Word: loan-shark
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...films, Li considers the most important to be Hero, Fearless and 2005's Danny the Dog, in which he plays a senseless brute, trained to savage anyone running foul of his loan-shark master. "Everything I want to say is in those three movies," he declares. "The message of Hero is that your personal suffering is not as important as the suffering of your country. The point of Danny the Dog is that violence is not a solution. Fearless is actually about personal growth - about a guy who decides that in the end his greatest enemy is himself...
...tends to countries that are so deep in crisis that the only options are ones that hurt. By the time a country asks for IMF aid, foreign investors have long since fled, international banks have shut their lending windows, and the world's private capital markets are offering the loan-shark interest rates that go to high-risk borrowers...
Thank you, Danny. And now Bill is very good at something else. In John McNaughton's Mad Dog and Glory, he's a loan-shark boss who shows his gratitude to a cop, Robert De Niro, by sending him a woman, Uma Thurman, for a week's pleasure. The movie is a little gimpy, and I wanted to fast-forward during the reaction shots. And you know our guy is playing the villain, because he goes to White Sox games and Bill is a famous Cubs fan. But, hey, he's molto impressive. He drops his voice half an octave...
Interest levels are far below the Mafia-like loan-shark rates of 20% or so that prevailed 24 months ago, but they are still very high by historical standards. Inflation, now at an annual rate of less than 4%, could be rekindled if the economy heats up too quickly. Already there are a few scant signs of that. In May, the producer price index, a harbinger of consumer prices, rose .3%, after declining slightly in April and March. Small though it was, it was the highest rise for the index so far this year...
Some mobsters have tried to win Galante's favor by turning over their businesses to him at distress-sale prices. In one deal, he scooped up the betting and loan-shark rackets in Pennsylvania Station, which net at least $500,000 a year. Other mobsters, including some nominally under Dellacroce, sold Galante a number of Manhattan sweatshops in which black and Hispanic women, many working at less than $3 an hour (the union scale is $4.81), stitch garments that are sold in legitimate clothing stores across the country. Authorities