Word: debts
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...fiscal suicide. Sanford even likened it to the hyper-inflationary policies of Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe, and he spent the past spring fighting to reject a quarter of South Carolina's $2.8 billion share of the funds unless he could use it to reduce the state's debt...
...rates. These days that's a given: rates are stuck between 0% and 0.25% for the foreseeable future. Instead, the only real news one can hope for out of a Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meeting has to do with the $1 trillion-plus stash of mortgages and other debt securities that the Fed has built up during the past two years of financial turmoil. Is it going to step up its purchases (meaning it's still worried about economic collapse) or start winding them down (meaning it's starting to worry about inflation...
...danger of using home equity to pay off nonhome debt: "A recent Federal Reserve report estimates that of the trillions of dollars in real home equity cashed out between 2001 and 2007, homeowners used $874 billion to pay off non-mortgage debt - in effect rolling consumer debt into their home loans. Unlike consumer debt, mortgage debt cannot be discharged through personal bankruptcy." (See pictures of the housing crisis...
...myth of the rational market was embraced with a fervor that even Irving Fisher never mustered. Financial markets knew best, the thinking went. They spread risk. They gathered and dispersed information. They regulated global economic affairs with a swiftness and decisiveness that governments couldn't match. And then, as debt markets began to freeze up in 2007, suddenly markets didn't do any of these things. "The whole intellectual edifice collapsed in the summer of last year," former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan said at a congressional hearing in October...
...issue isn't whether financial markets are useful--they are--or whether the prices of stocks or bonds or collateralized debt obligations convey information--they do. There's also much to be said for the insight at the heart of efficient-market theory: markets are hard to outsmart. But when we give up second-guessing the market, we suspend our judgment. And without participants' exercising judgment--applying research, heeding a broker's opinion--markets stand no chance of ever getting prices right...