Word: fed
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...students also use devious methods to make the grade. Last year two dozen were caught being fed answers through Bluetooth headsets concealed under wigs. Earlier this month, police busted a ring issuing fake IDs to university students taking the test in place of high school candidates. The price? $2,500, more than twice Vietnam's average annual wage. Authorities have beefed up security: keeping test papers under lock and key; sequestering exam professors; calling in security to guard test sites...
...Interest rates are set in two main ways. Short-term rates--like those on credit cards, home-equity loans and adjustable-rate mortgages (ARMS)--are determined mostly by the Federal Reserve. It sets them with an eye on inflation. If the Fed fears that prices are rising too fast, it will raise rates to slow the economy. Longer-term rates, like those on a standard mortgage, are set on the open market. They are partly a bet on how well the Fed will control inflation but also reflect supply and demand. If there are lots of people with money...
...regional depression, there just wasn't much demand for money outside the U.S. There also wasn't much demand for that other crucial economic fuel--fuel. As a result, the long-term rates set by the market stayed low, and falling prices of oil and other commodities allowed the Fed to keep short-term rates down even as the U.S. economy boomed...
After the stock-market crash of 2001 and 2002, the Fed worried that inflation was so low it might turn into deflation. So it cut short-term rates even further, reducing them to 1% in 2003, while the yield on the 10-year Treasury bond--a key benchmark of long-term rates--dropped as low as 3.13%. The result: a real estate boom, as ultra-low mortgage rates made houses affordable at ever higher prices. Cash from refinancings and home-equity loans also kept consumer spending strong. By mid-2004, confident that deflation was out of the picture, the Fed...
...spender of last resort," says Robert J. Barbera, chief economist at the brokerage firm ITG. The world economy is in its fifth year of nearly 5% growth. But the U.S. is no longer leading. Foreign financial markets are booming and pulling in money. Rising commodity prices are complicating the Fed's inflation-fighting job. As a result, the U.S. consumer can no longer count on a steady flow of low-interest debt...