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...word's financial markets looking for investments. That money can now move around very easily. But even if a relatively small portion of that money goes after something - say, mortgages - it can quickly cause a bubble and a crisis. So all this good work we have done in the past few years to make our capital markets more efficient and open has also made them very hazardous, and we haven't done anything yet to address that problem. (See pictures of TIME's Wall Street covers...
Such lack of output is no longer acceptable. "They were reasonably pathetic performances," says Roger Jackson, a 1964 Olympic rowing gold medalist and CEO of Own the Podium, an organization that has received about $109 million in government and private funds over the past five years to develop athletes for the Vancouver Olympics. "I can tell you that we're going to have several gold medals this year," he says. "I guarantee it." Whoa. Is a Canadian really issuing a freewheeling, Joe Namath-style guarantee? "It's a nice word, isn't it?" says Jackson...
Plus, officials insist that the nonchalance of the past was almost ridiculous. "We joke about it," Jackson says. "There's this wonderful old cartoon of a Canadian athlete with an international president who was handing out medals. It was sort of this Tiny Tim thing. 'Please sir, may we have a medal? Oh no? Well then, thank you for your kind consideration.' That was the Canadian motto. It was hilarious because it was mostly true. We just said, Look, this is nonsense. Let's have some fun with this; let's try to improve...
...there has been no response from Khamenei, though right-wing hard-liners have heaped scorn on the proposal. But there are some signs that the state may be open to a deal, or at least to giving some breathing room to the opposition. In the past two weeks, state television ran a series of programs that allowed critics of President Ahmadinejad to openly air their views. In January, a parliamentary panel accused former Tehran prosecutor Saeed Mortazavi, a hard-line former judge, of being responsible for the violent deaths of three jailed opposition dissenters after antigovernment protests in July...
...that would involve the incumbent either being ousted or having his power considerably diluted. The leaders of the opposition risk losing the backing of their supporters in the streets if they are too willing to reconcile themselves with Ahmadinejad, given all the blood that has been spilled over the past six months. (See TIME's Pictures of the Week...