Word: factly
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Rumor reported as fact is an epidemic in Pakistan. Very recently the English-language daily the News ran the front-page headline PLANS READY TO TAKE OUT PAK NUCLEAR ARSENAL. The unbylined story, about a secret U.S. commando force tasked with infiltrating Pakistan to secure its nuclear weapons, was based on a Fox News online report describing a worst-case-scenario contingency plan should Pakistan be taken over by extremists. There were no named sources in the News story, and much of the reporting depended on e-mailed comments to the website. Nevertheless, it fueled hysterical discussions on TV chat...
...financial markets. This wasn't a broken-clock-is-right-twice-a-day thing: Schiff appeared on the national scene just as the credit bubble was reaching maximum inflation and offered a critique of the nation's unsustainably debt-fueled economic trajectory that is now--after the fact--widely accepted...
...models of how the world works makes groups better at solving problems. Our society failed spectacularly this decade at solving the problem of how to price houses and mortgage bonds. It would have done better if people had paid more attention to skeptical voices like Schiff's. "The fact that he was right this time doesn't mean he's going to be right the next time, but somebody will be," says University of Michigan social scientist Scott Page. "All models are wrong, and that's why you want a diversity of models." Seconds Schiff: "You're never going...
...billion, about 16% of GDP. In contrast, the $787 billion stimulus package approved by the U.S. Congress in February is just 6% of GDP. While upwards of 75% of Chinese spending will go toward infrastructure, just 10% of U.S. spending will. The difference to an extent reflects the fact that the nations are at different stages of economic development: America's railroad networks were built in the 19th century (and show it), and its interstate-highway system was mainly constructed in the 1950s and '60s. But it also speaks to the sheer scale of China's ambition to modernize itself...
...certain advantages when it comes to managing shifting economic winds. There's no peskily powerful Congress to worry about, for one thing; what the Chinese government wants in the way of policy, it gets. Christopher Wood, chief Asia strategist for the brokerage and investment firm CLSA, says the fact that China's economy is a hybrid of capitalism and a socialist command economy has given the government much greater flexibility to intervene. Beijing more or less ordered Chinese banks to increase lending in response to the global financial meltdown. Wood, a former journalist well known for predicting the bursting...