Word: interesting
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...shine. In the past year, the U.K. currency has lost about a fifth of its value against the euro, the currency used in much of the rest of Europe, and 30% against the dollar. Causes aren't hard to come by. Worries over Britain's fast-shrinking economy, plunging interest rates, a wobbly banking sector and creaking government finances have driven traders to dump the pound. "I would urge you to sell any sterling you might have," Jim Rogers, once a business partner of George Soros and now chairman of a Singapore investment company, told Bloomberg on Jan. 20 just...
Though the complaint against Cosmo does not cite an official Ponzi scheme, it certainly looks and smells like a Ponzi. The complaint alleges that Agape's bridge loans were touted as secured by borrowers' assets and that investors would receive substantial interest returns ranging from 48% to 80% per year. Records indicate that from Jan. 1, 2006, to Nov. 30, 2008, more than $370 million was deposited into Agape accounts - the vast majority of which was provided by more than 1,500 investors - and that less than $10 million of the $370 million was actually used to make loans...
...been a big problem. "Europe never had Glass-Steagall," he said. "So why didn't this happen in Europe rather than here?" On derivatives he was a bit more nuanced: All he and the Clinton Administration were trying to do with the 2000 bill, he claimed, was establish that interest-rate and currency swaps - two relatively uncontroversial forms of over-the-counter derivatives - couldn't be regulated as futures by the CFTC. At the time, credit-default swaps weren't on the radar, and the bill didn't prevent the Securities and Exchange Commission or bank regulators from stepping...
...force was a Federal Reserve interest-rate policy that was appropriate for the previous "inventory cycle" recessions since World War II, but didn't fit at all the collapse of a speculative bubble in the stock market in 2001 and 2002. Consumers, and the housing market, weren't in a recession at all - and the Fed's super-low rates precipitated a bubble. "We inadvertently stimulated an industry that was already in boom conditions," Gramm said. "This changed everything. It changed consumption behavior, it changed lending behavior...
...November, the last month for which data is available, Beijing actually added $29 billion to its overall position in U.S. debt. (Beijing sold $9.2 billion of long-term U.S. Treasuries in November but bought $38.2 billion of short-term government notes.) Indeed, part of the reason short-term interest rates are so low in the U.S., as Council on Foreign Relations economist Brad Setser notes, is that foreign central banks - including China's - are doing the same thing private investors have been doing: pouring funds into short-term, highly liquid, dollar-based assets. If China reversed course and pulled money...