Word: plain
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...drug trade. Powder cocaine was generally measured and sold in multiple-dose amounts behind locked doors, but crack was relatively cheap and highly portable. Upstart young dealers saw an opening and shouldered their way into a business long dominated by established kingpins. Trading valuable drugs for ready cash in plain sight was a recipe for robbery and intimidation. Dealers armed themselves for protection, and soon every teenage squabble in crack territory carried a risk that bullets would...
...jarring to real estate because the system is numb to the pain. When problems first arose in subprime, homeowners and financiers alike were caught off guard. But since those early days of the real estate crisis, all sorts of loans have gone sour in large numbers, including plain-vanilla 30-year fixed rates. "Option ARMs don't have the monopoly on poor performance," says Amherst senior managing director Laurie Goodman. "It permeates the market." When the resets come, we'll feel it - but it won't be anything we haven't felt before...
...been a stumbling block as the Senate has struggled to put together a bipartisan bill, and even the House version was watered down a bit. Small banks were allowed to keep their old regulators; realtors and auto dealers were exempted from new regulation; a requirement that lenders offer "plain-vanilla" mortgages in addition to exotic products was scrapped. (Read "Don't Kill the Consumer Financial Protection Agency...
...some pork for Alabama. Now Dodd is trying to negotiate with Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee, who said in a recent interview that he truly believes an agreement is possible. But in that same interview, Corker described some modest Administration proposals - like giving consumers the option of a simple "plain-vanilla" mortgage - as "way, way out in left field." He also said that when Obama proposed a small tax on large banks to recoup the costs of the bailouts, he wondered if he was living in the U.S. or Venezuela. And he's considered the most compromise-friendly Republican...
...crack down on the money laundering and secret banking systems that fund much of the terrorism in the world. But as evidence in both the U.S. and Europe suggests, illicit finances continue to circulate around the globe - and quite often the money has nothing to do with violence, but plain greed. Indeed, a new report released by the U.S. Senate this month cites cases of huge volumes of suspect cash being moved from Africa to the U.S. for no other reason than to fatten the bank accounts of crooked leaders, shady arms dealers and conniving middlemen. And experts warn that...