Word: portentousness
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...economic commentary may not cause as much speculation and anxiety as that of U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, but the words of China's Premier Wen Jiabao have taken on new portent in global financial markets. The fast-growing Chinese economy, the world's sixth largest, is experiencing irrational exuberance, mainland style, and it's up to Wen to reassure everyone that Beijing can ease the country's growth rate from last year's torrid (unofficial) rate of 11.5% to single-digit levels?and do so without causing a crash that slashes China's demand for imports...
...stop it? Washington buzzed with these questions last week as the Bush administration defended itself against charges from its erstwhile counter-terrorism czar, Richard A. Clarke, that it did not do all it could have to avert the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Amidst this brouhaha, an ominous portent of further and more deadly attacks upon American soil went virtually unnoticed. The North Korean regime of Kim Jong Il, through its mouthpiece Radio Pyongyang, explicitly rejected America’s demand for the “complete, verifiable, irreversible dismantling” of its nuclear weapons program. Now that...
...first “flash mob” in New England gathered in Harvard Square yesterday, bringing one of the newest and quirkiest Internet fads—and the portent of a new sort of sociological phenomenon, some say—to Cambridge...
...George Harrison, who really did know he was dying when he wrote his last album, Brainwashed (Capitol), it's unavoidable. During his lifetime, Harrison tested the limits of human patience with his fetish for Zen homilies, and in his final act as a songwriter he has left mystical portent in every rhyme. On Any Road, Harrison rasps, "I keep traveling around the bend/There was no beginning, there is no end." On Stuck Inside a Cloud he takes the mike with him to the great beyond: "Talking to myself/Crying out loud/Only I can hear me/I'm stuck inside a cloud...
...unemployment remains stalled at 6%, close to its eight-year high. The economy is growing, but the stock market isn't. The bubble in tech stocks has popped, but some are worried another is swelling in the housing market. It's been that kind of economy, where each hopeful portent comes wrapped in anxiety...