Word: esoterica
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...other disaster, took the cash it got for lending out stock owned by AIG and invested the money in esoteric securities rather than in risk-free Treasuries, the standard practice. The idea was - I'm not kidding - to make an extra one-fifth of 1% in interest. When the esoterica, which the stock-loan folks thought was riskless, crumbled, so did the firm. (See the worst business deals...
...wellspring for the paranoia that motivates much of the book, and brokers Chase’s introduction to the other major players, Oona Laszlo and Richard Abneg.Chase and Tooth shortly develop a fast, if strange friendship defined by Perkus’ love for marijuana, cheeseburgers, coffee, and esoterica. Their daily smoke sessions serve an indoctrinatory function as well: Tooth enmeshes both Chase and the reader in the interconnections between things as seemingly disparate as Marlon Brando, “Gnuppets” (cf. Muppets), and the redemption of New York City at large. The level of associations starts small...
That's the goal, according to the site's two 26-year-old founders, Josh Foer and Dylan Thuras. They started the site, described as a "compendium of the world's wonders, curiosities and esoterica" three weeks ago, seeding it with strange places discovered on a road trip across the U.S. and during an extended stay in Hungary. Travelers from around the world have since chipped in with local oddities they've discovered on their own. (See TIME.com/travel for city guides, stories and advice...
...like Lehman, was ultimately done in by credit-rating agencies, of all things. The main credit raters - Moody's and Standard & Poor's - had blithely assigned top-drawer AAA and AA ratings to all sorts of hinky mortgage securities and other financial esoterica without understanding the risks involved. Would you know how to rate a collateralized loan obligation? Or commercial-mortgage-backed securities? Sophisticated investors took Moody's and S&P's word for it, and it turned out that the agencies didn't know what they were doing. Credit raters, who claim to offer only opinions, are party...
...among an American readership weary of the pop cultural status quo, but Jacoby jeopardizes her message by shrouding it in tiresome, digressive analysis that often comes off as pedantic, or, worse, irrelevant. Seemingly eager to show she did her homework, much of the book is occupied by painful, analytic esoterica that sacrifices the reader’s interest for mere chronological adherence. While the cultural shifts that occurred in the mid-twentieth century are undoubtedly important to understanding American’s intellectual landscape, Jacoby’s analysis slogs through these changes in a way so slow and torturous...