Word: panic
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...Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department pointedly refused to bail the company out, and no other Wall Street outfit was willing to step into the breach. It was the largest bankruptcy ever in the U.S., but the really big news was what happened afterward. First came a financial panic that threatened to shatter the global capitalist order, then came an unprecedented, and unprecedentedly expensive, effort by governments on both sides of the Atlantic to patch things...
Three main lessons present themselves. First, our complex financial system is awfully fragile. Second, government action is capable of keeping a financial panic from snowballing into a complete economic disaster along the lines of the Great Depression. Third, the government has - in large part because of its success in averting disaster - found it difficult to take any actions that would make the financial system less fragile in the future. That would, apparently, be too much government intervention...
Then came the Panic of '08. Investors saw Treasuries as a safe haven and poured money into them, driving down interest rates. Officials in Washington spared no expense in battling the crisis. The result is a deficit of unprecedented size but with no perceptible pressure from financial markets to reduce it. No pressure so far, at least. The federal debt, at $7.6 trillion, is now above 50% of GDP and rising. The government faces commitments to Social Security and Medicare that dwarf that figure. Republican congressional leaders have decided they care about deficits again - and seem to be making headway...
Certainly, opening HealthMap to user-based reports could introduce an element of chaos, and even outright panic, into disease surveillance - ordinary people aren't trained epidemiologists. Global health officials already struggle to separate the noise from the truth; for every actual outbreak of a new disease, there are countless false or overstated reports. But in an interconnected age, when both information and disease can spread in an instant, having an imperfect network is better than none at all. "This is an alert tool that is not trying to raise fear but awareness instead," says Brownstein. "We want to encourage good...
...rise in insider selling, which developed over the past several weeks, signals a time for caution, not panic, says Jonathan Moreland, analyst at InsiderInsights, a stock-market advisory service. "The insiders are telling me, O.K., there's a yellow light now; the green light is off," he says. In response, Moreland is advising his clients to raise the cash component of their investment portfolios. (Read "Despite the Economy's Struggles, Stock Market Soars...