Word: direness
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...latest economic indicators are dire: exports were down nearly 14% in the fourth quarter, a record three-month drop; with U.S. consumers shutting their wallets, the big guns of corporate Japan - among them Toyota and Sony - are forecasting historic losses and firing thousands of workers; Japan's unemployment rate has spiked to 4.4%, a level not seen in more than five decades. "We have a once-in-a-hundred-year crisis and the policy response is not even average," says Jesper Koll, president and CEO of Tantallon Research Japan. "The people running the show are not politicians, not independent...
Finding things that work is on every publisher's and editor's mind these days. The situation in Europe is not quite as dire as it is in the U.S., where plunging profits, shrinking staff numbers and bankruptcies are now all commonplace. But Europe's newspapers are struggling just the same. Investment guru (and owner of a big chunk of the Washington Post Co.) Warren Buffett saw this coming. In 2006, he explained the depressing law of newspaper gravity at a meeting of his Berkshire Hathaway Corp.: "Newspaper readers are heading into the cemetery, while nonnewspaper readers are just getting...
With Harvard in dire straits, the Wildcats smelled blood...
...political suicide is not a good system. The other alternative is for the Republican Party to stand firm on its no-tax pledge and solve the crisis by only cuts and shutdowns. George Skelton of the Los Angeles Times recently pointed out that the no-tax solution offers two dire options: fire all the state workers and shut down the University of California and the state colleges, or eliminate all state money for health care and social services - all the monies that help the blind and disabled, aged, homebound, poor, mentally ill, those on welfare, those in emergency rooms...
...woes have an obvious cause: the public perception is that his administration has failed to come up with strong enough medicine to counteract the country's increasingly dire economic plight. The world's second-largest economy shrank at an alarming annualized rate of 12.7% last quarter, its worst quarterly contraction since the 1974 oil shock. Exports also fell an unprecedented 13.9%, while the unemployment rate shot up to 4.4% in December, reaching levels not seen since World War II. "There is no doubt that the economy is in its worst state in the postwar period," said Economic and Fiscal Policy...