Word: late
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...late 1980s, after banking laws were relaxed, Japan went on a credit binge that made the modern U.S. look prudent. The stock market took off into the stratosphere, and property prices got so out of control that it was said the land on which the Imperial Palace sat in the center of Tokyo was worth more than the whole of California. Then the bubble burst, banks found that their balance sheets were full of bad loans, and Japan entered a lost decade of stagnant economic growth. Nearly 20 years after its peak in December 1989, when the Nikkei index nearly...
...leach toxic assets out of a financial system and restore confidence so that consumers shop rather than stash their money in safe-deposit boxes. While domestic demand remains sluggish, government spending has to take up the slack and keep at it. In Japan, a recovery was aborted in the late 1990s when, at the first sight of green shoots, the government raised taxes. President Barack Obama is committed to reducing this year's federal budget deficit of $1.3 trillion by half in four years. That's a laudable goal - as long as private-sector demand has picked up by then...
...duality comes in. It is a nation that does not always find it easy to change, to embrace the future. In Tokyo's Ota Memorial Museum of Art this month, there is an exquisite exhibition of ukiyo-e woodblock prints displaying Japan during the Meiji Restoration in the late 19th century, when Western habits - European music and military uniforms, crinolines - were beginning to replace the old ways. In one print, a woman in traditional kimono and lacquered hair watches wistfully as a young girl, hair flying behind her, joyfully rides a bicycle...
...keep the wombat from going the way of the dodo, environmental officials gathered at Epping in late 2007 to brainstorm a radical shift in strategy: they would abandon business as usual by embracing Big Business. The wombat program had operated on a shoestring budget for years, and millions were needed to establish the second colony. "To do this properly, we need the big bucks," said Queensland wildlife-conservation chief Rebecca Williams, sitting at a table outside the ramshackle trailer that serves as the camp's kitchen and makeshift lab. "So think differently...
Also at the table was Wes Mannion, head of Australia Zoo, the for-profit founded by the late Steve Irwin, the "Crocodile Hunter." The zoo had inked a deal with the government to help save the wombat, mainly through research support. "It's all about the marketing and money, mate," chimed in Mannion, an Irwin look-alike in his Aussie safari outfit. That view won over Alan Horsup, a conservation officer who spent the past two decades in an often lonely quest to pull the northern hairy-nose back from the edge of extinction. "I didn't like...