Word: hilt
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...position inside the Fed, a colleague says. Some regional Fed presidents thought he was excessively gloomy. As an insider put it, they thought Geithner had been captured by his constituents - the heads of the largest banks and investment firms in New York, most of whom were leveraged to the hilt and deeply vulnerable to turmoil in the mortgage-backed-securities market. But Geithner's view prevailed that week with his boss, Ben Bernanke. A few weeks later, the Fed slashed its key interest rate by half a percentage point, and soon it was trying to figure out other, less conventional...
...investors who bought their wares and the ratings agencies that evaluated them, agreed that by applying the proper equations it was possible to, say, bundle a bunch of subprime mortgages, chop them up and sell the pieces as fairly safe securities, even as they were leveraged to the hilt. Why? The mathematical models--backward-looking and based on just a few years' data from an asset bubble--said so. "As an industry, we let financial tools be a substitute for human judgment," says Kevin Blakely, CEO of the trade group Risk Management Association. "There's been such an earthquake...
...credit crunch is not anywhere near over. "It took 20 years for us to get into this situation - leveraged to the hilt - and it will take more than a couple of years to unwind it," says Paul Ashworth, senior U.S. economist at Capital Economics. "And even when we get back to normal, that normal is not going to be the same. We won't have this sort of freely available credit that we had before for households and businesses. It's going to be a different reality - a more austere one - when we come out on the other...
...some industry experts say the stand-alone investment-bank model is no longer working. Investment banks made buckets of money for many years by tapping capital markets and leveraging to the hilt. But with credit drying up, financing activities with deposits - like commercial banks do - appears to be a better strategy. Commercial banks like Wachovia also have fairly conservative caps on the amount of leverage they use, which affords them greater flexibility during periods of financial-system stress...
...Sundays. So he became the first President to be baptized in office and joined National Presbyterian. The minister had promised there would be no publicity, but as Eisenhower wrote angrily in his diary, "we were scarcely home before the fact was being publicized, by the pastor, to the hilt...