Word: londonized
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...those attending the G-20 summit in London this week want a quick lesson on how economic booms can turn into busts and how grandiose bets on real estate plays can get you into trouble, they would do well to learn the lesson of their surroundings. The summit of leaders from 19 of the world's key economies will be held in London's docklands, just east of Canary Wharf, a real estate megaventure conceived on industrial wasteland in Britain's go-go 1980s. By the time the first part of the project was completed in the early 1990s, Britain...
...same has happened to the global economy. In the hangover of a credit binge fueled by about a trillion too many real estate dreams, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) predicts that this year will be the first since 1945 to see a contraction in world economic output. The London summit is designed to both ameliorate the present crisis and try and head off future ones. (See pictures of the global financial crisis...
...London meeting will last only a day, and its agenda is potentially vast, so don't expect everything to be settled. Remember, too, that the outcomes of international summits are, in the jargon, "precooked." That is to say, unless something goes really wrong, the final communiqué will have been hammered out in advance by the summiteers' "sherpas" - the officials who do the heavy lifting for heads of government before the grand panjandrums get together for their little chats...
...Bearing those caveats in mind, expect the London summit to concentrate on four main issues...
...Nonetheless, there is always hope - as summiteers could discover if they consider their surroundings. Canary Wharf may have looked like a white elephant in the 1990s, but - not without some trials and tribulations - it has since become an essential part of London's economy, expanding the center of that amoeba-like city to the east. So do big bets on real estate ever pay off? Anyone who saw the sheer scale of decrepitude and decay of London's docklands in the early 1980s like I did will need no convincing that they sometimes do. In the ever turning cycle...