Word: fines
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...market. The boom was financed in part by collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), securities based on subprime mortgages that have come to define toxic asset. Companies that held CDOs could offset their risk by buying CDSs from AIG FP. Or they could simply speculate with the instrument. It all worked fine until overbuilding by housing firms and overleveraging by consumers caused the bubble to burst. Which in turn caused the value of CDOs to plunge. Which caused holders of CDSs on such securities to demand payment from...
Like most multinational corporations, Unilever, the Anglo-Dutch household-products giant, is feeling the sting of the global recession. But at least one part of Unilever's empire is doing fine. Several years ago, the company launched a corporate-social-responsibility (CSR) program, in which it hired thousands of Indian women to sell the company's soaps, detergents and other items in their home villages, most of them too small and remote to rate a visit from a Unilever sales representative. The program, called Shakti (Energy), was meant to aid some of the company's poorest customers...
...easy to spread the blame for this sorry state of affairs. The meeting is being held under the auspices of the G20, an informal grouping that has none of the bureaucratic trappings that can help ensure fine words are turned into concrete action. Reaching a consensus among the U.S, Japan and Europe in the old G7 cartel was hard enough; doing so in the G20, which includes China, India, Russia, Brazil and Mexico, is exponentially harder. It doesn't help that members' interests vary so sharply. China, for example, owns so much U.S. government debt that it's publicly worrying...
...North Atlantic Treaty Organization, formed in 1949 to counter Soviet expansion into the heart of Europe, started winning 20 years ago, when the Berlin Wall fell, and with it all those Soviet-installed regimes between Berlin and Sofia. So the old lady, now celebrating her 60th birthday in fine health, should have died a long time ago. When exactly? A fitting year could have been 1991, when the Soviet Union committed suicide. Or three years later, when the last Russian troops pulled out of Central Europe. No more threat, no more alliance...
Kentridge was born in 1955 in Johannesburg, the "rather desperate provincial city," as he's called it, where he still lives and works. His parents were both lawyers active in defending victims of apartheid. Their son took degrees in politics and fine arts from South African schools. For a time he tried acting. In the early '80s he studied mime and theater in Paris. But by the middle of that decade, back in Johannesburg, he had committed himself...