Word: plainness
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...month that the University’s investment strategies generated an average annual return of 8.9 percent over the past 10 years, including last year’s financial crisis—far exceeding the annualized 1.5 percent return that would have been generated by a “plain vanilla” portfolio of stocks and bonds...
Historian H.W. Brands of the University of Texas points to the demise of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999 as an unfortunate tipping point of deregulation. Glass-Steagall, passed in 1933, separated investment banking and plain-vanilla banking, which some experts argued made markets safer. (Certain restrictions of Glass-Steagall were repealed to allow the merger of Citicorp and Travelers. Let's just say that didn't end well.) "That was the single moment when the seeds for the bad stuff were planted," says Brands. "There was a belief that technology, the Internet and financial instruments had changed things...
...model that determines how extensive the levees should be. For instance, the Corps did not consider the tendency of soil to sink over time, and it excluded the possibility of a highly powerful storm hitting the city because that was unlikely, which violates sophisticated principles of statistics and just plain common sense. On Nov. 18, a federal judge ruled that the Corps was directly responsible for flooding in St. Bernard Parish and the Lower Ninth Ward. "The Corps' lassitude and failure to fulfill its duties resulted in a catastrophic loss of human life and property in unprecedented proportions," the judge...
...countries have such a healthy appetite for it all. In 2004, after 10-year old María Isabel of Spain won with her ode to materialism called, I'd Rather Be Dead Than Plain, French broadcasters dismissed the show as "vulgar" and withdrew from all future contests. In 2006, Denmark and Norway followed suit, claiming that the high-profile event puts too much pressure on young children. With that in mind, the producers of the competition have taken steps to let children be children - and slow their maturation into the scantily clad stars common in the adult version...
...trial of Sabahuddin Ahmed for his work in facilitating last year's Mumbai massacre reveals an uncomfortable truth about India. Unlike his fellow accused, the Pakistani gunman Mohammad Amir Ajmal Qasab, Sabahuddin is Indian and for five years he was an alleged one-man sleeper cell hiding in plain sight. Even though he was arrested almost 10 months before the Mumbai attack, Sabahuddin had allegedly managed to provide enough information in terms of directions and diagrams to allow the terrorists to launch their assault with "absolute precision...