Word: prop
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...nonobvious answer is: the central banks of emerging economies. To keep their currencies from appreciating too much against the dollar, emerging nations continue to buy increasingly large amounts of U.S. debt. This provides the U.S. with an indirect funding source to prop up its banks and brokerages, but it's a compromised solution. After all, the willingness of central banks to lend almost without limit to America helped create this mess. Cheap money from abroad suppressed U.S. long-term interest rates, helping to set the stage for the housing bubble and its catastrophic collapse. Continuing such inappropriate monetary and exchange...
...touchiness? Berlin has long been used by presidential image-makers as a political prop. During the Cold War, the city was the proving ground of the East-West conflict, the principal theater in the struggle between freedom and authoritarianism. Truman made the first presidential visit to postwar Berlin, driving through the ruins of the city in the wake of the Allied bombardment. The Allies' refusal to abandon the city to the Soviets, demonstrated most dramatically during the Berlin airlift of 1948, endeared a generation of Berliners to the U.S. When Kennedy arrived in Berlin in 1962, the city was gripped...
...waits in Kuwait for the order to invade Iraq, there's a troubling rumor. It's not about the mission or WMD or the equipment they have not received. It's about Jennifer Lopez. J. Lo's dead, the buzz says, and the government is hiding the truth to prop up morale...
...suicide attempts the antidepressants may have prevented by improving a soldier's spirits. "The high percentage of U.S. soldiers attempting suicide after taking SSRIs should raise serious concerns," says Dr. Joseph Glenmullen, who teaches psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. "And there's no question they're using them to prop people up in difficult circumstances...
...Oliveira carries a cane, but he uses it less for support than as a jaunty prop -twirling it, pointing it at the cheering audience - till you expect him to break into a song-and-dance routine. The cane might be a tribute to his first cinema idol, the dapper French comic Max Linder, who influenced Charlie Chaplin, Oliveira's second idol. In the audience, clearly buoyed by the old man's energy, were other distinguished directors: Cannes Jury President Sean Penn, Marjane Satrapi of Persepolis and a young pup named Clint Eastwood, who will...