Word: nears
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...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...
...seen this movie before, and it's not a happy one. Japan's financial sector imploded in the 1990s as bubbles in real estate and stock prices (sound familiar?) burst. Eventually, Japan's central bank drove interest rates to near zero to stimulate the economy. But it was, as the economists say, "pushing on a string." Banks were reluctant to lend because they needed to hoard capital to repair their balance sheets - just as they need to do now in the U.S. Economic growth slowed, and demand for the credit that was available diminished. The result was Japan's infamous...
...been downhill ever since. First came the run on Northern Rock, the stricken bank that the government ended up nationalizing, whose near failure raised serious questions about the effectiveness of U.K. banking regulation. Then came a damaging political storm over the taxing of "non-doms"--wealthy foreigners who move to Britain and are taxed on their U.K. income only. Following last month's rescues of HBOS and Bradford & Bingley, the big question is, What sort of new regulatory measures will be put in place as a result of the current market meltdown...
...hold, largely because of the company's method of counting the three steps of foreclosure separately; the numbers, critics said, were wildly inflated. One of the protests came from Kathi Williams, director of the Colorado Division of Housing, who in 2007 publicly called RealtyTrac's numbers--which put Colorado near the top of the list of states with foreclosure problems--"ridiculous and irresponsible." "It was devastating Colorado in terms of consumer confidence and mortgage lending into the state," she says. The Mortgage Bankers Association, which releases well-watched loan-default data of its own, came out swinging as well, with...
They run, March, curse, fight, sing--and occasionally die--on a cavernous expanse of stage nearly half a football field wide. In their dress-up uniforms, they're an exotic-looking bunch: wearing kilts, playing bagpipes, sporting tam-o'-shanters with a red feather. This Scottish army regiment seems out of place in Iraq, transferred from Basra to bolster U.S. troops bogged down in the "triangle of death" near Baghdad. But their plainspoken, Highland-accented gripes about the war have a familiar ring. "You're no' really doing the job you're trained for," says one soldier...