Word: debt
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Other criticisms of the current climate have focused on debt, bemoaning that gargantuan loans for law school aren't exactly easy to defray. According to the American Bar Association, the average law-school student who graduates this year will do so with a little more than $73,000 in debt. Larry Kramer, dean of Stanford Law School in Palo Alto, Calif., acknowledges there's a problem. "Something about the way the system works has to give," he says. "If you're going to defer someone for a year, there really needs to be a certain degree of loan forgiveness...
...billions of dollars of taxpayer money into the pot to increase jobs, cut taxes for most citizens, and put a safety net under financial firms is excessive. One of the things that these governments rarely admit is that they may not have the capacity to borrow in the open debt market the way that the U.S. Treasury can. China may not want to own paper from the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg and it is hard to blame the communist central government in the big Asian country for that. The U.S. is still viewed as unique in both the size...
...some banks do sell, though, it could force a widespread, and revealing, revaluation of similar assets on every bank's books. The banks have been asking regulators and accountants for, and getting, relief from having to mark some of their assets to market prices because the markets for many debt securities are so clearly broken. But the prices prevailing in a smoothly functioning government-subsidized market will be hard to ignore. This has led to speculation in the economics blogosphere that banks might game the program by conniving with investors to overbid for assets. That's not inconceivable...
...American home quadrupled. The Dow Jones industrial average climbed from 803 in the summer of 1982 to 14,165 in the fall of 2007. From the beginning of the '80s through 2007, the share of disposable income that each household spent servicing its mortgage and consumer debt increased 35%. Back in 1982, the average household saved 11% of its disposable income. By 2007 that number was less than 1%. (See TIME's top 25 people to blame for the financial crisis...
Work the Program Given that we've brought on the current crises through a quarter-century of self-destructive financial excess and overdependence on debt and fossil fuels, during the same quarter-century we've all become familiar with a way of thinking about self-destructive excess and dependence. The vocabulary of addiction recovery could come in handy just now. We are like substance abusers coming off a long bender, hitting bottom (we can only hope) and taking the messes we've made as a sobering wake-up call. I've always thought many of the 12 Steps were superfluous...