Word: new
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Dubai debacle triggered immediate concern about a new wave of financial problems rippling through global markets. Stock-market indexes plummeted, the cost of insuring against a default by Dubai jumped and the dollar strengthened as investors rushed back into greenbacks. On Friday afternoon, stock markets made something of a recovery as analysts took a second look at what Dubai's proposed repayment halt means. Eighty billion dollars - Dubai's total liabilities - may sound like a lot of money but in the context of the past year, it's not huge. And while banks like HSBC and Barclays have billions...
...much stuff that we've struggled to find places to fit it all. The U.S. went from having 300 million square feet of self-storage space in 1984 to 2.4 billion square feet in 2008, according to the Self Storage Association, a 700% surge. By 2005, one in five new houses came with three garage bays-the third, real-estate agents explained, to store all the "toys." (See which businesses are bucking the recession...
...only one singing this song. Anti-consumerism groups like Adbusters and the Church of Stop Shopping have been buoyed by the recent hiccup in the Age of Excess and are protesting against shopping centers with renewed zeal. The Center for the New American Dream, which promotes responsible consumption, is out in full force this holiday season, explaining how to give gifts that don't include buying things at the store (for example: coupons for free babysitting...
...have this cycle we've developed-work intensively, buy more, repeat," says Carolyn Danckaert, New American Dream's director of home and communities programs. "At a certain point, the accumulation of stuff starts to drive your life." As Juliet Schor, an economist at Boston College who helps run the group, points out in her book The Overworked American, when workers became more productive over the second half of the 20th century, we as a society chose to take the benefit as more stuff. We could have also decided to, say, work a little less...
...devotes the better part of two chapters to how inexpensive goods mess with our minds. She describes one experiment in which researchers used brain scans to show that the joy of a discounted item comes before it's bought; by the time a person is at home with his new thing, the luster is gone. On Black Friday, I watched shoppers on TV proudly state how much they were saving on this and that. No one mentioned how much they were spending...