Word: offsets
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Robin Cormack, one of the exhibition's curators, sees the wooden sculpture as crucial to understanding the Byzantines' obsession with ceremony and mystery, which he believes were efforts to offset a low-rumbling sense of insecurity. Byzantine figures and icons seem crudely rendered to us now because the artists carefully chose to make them generic and timeless. "If you give a figure a [personalized] resemblance," Cormack explains, "it becomes ephemeral, like its model...
...September - household consumption, at only 40% of GDP (compared with about 65% in industrialized countries), isn't yet substantial enough to maintain China's high growth rates. "I don't think [domestic spending] will replace what has been lost in exports," says UBS economist Wang Tao. Nor will it offset another weakening pillar of China's economy: real estate. Rampant construction of new office towers and apartment blocks in recent years was a huge boon to growth. But government action to cool down the market, by, for example, restricting credit for property development, is resulting in a sharp falloff...
Though it came on the heels of the Great Depression and the beginning of the end of World War II, the Bretton Woods system addressed global ills that began as early as the first World War, when governments (including the U.S.) began controlling imports and exports to offset wartime blockades. This, in turn, led to the manipulation of currencies to shape foreign trade. Currency warfare and restrictive market practices helped spark the devaluation, deflation and depression that defined the economy of the 1930s...
...sizzle. On the Indonesian island, vacation homes mostly take the form of individually constructed villas or those built by smaller developers. The houses, usually designed in a Bali modern style that is now an architectural touchstone for tropical hotels worldwide, are often rented out most of the year to offset building and maintenance costs. Although the Bali model allows for personal creativity, it also means that owners must hire full-time staff to tend to their paying guests, who fork out an average of $200 a night for a two-bedroom villa. In Phuket, however, the vacation market is dominated...
This grim outlook presents some particularly tricky challenges to those in charge. In previous downturns, such as the early 1990s slump, governments typically ramped up state spending in order to offset the drop in business activity. But this time, the gigantic cost of bank bailouts will leave national treasuries with little room for maneuver. Indeed, the bailout plans - under which stricken banks will receive direct injections of taxpayer money to strengthen their capital base, while governments provide guarantees aimed at getting banks to lend to one another again - may well throw government finances seriously out of kilter...