Word: ruinous
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Although the hedge-fund industry has long relished the light touch of lawmakers and financial regulators, a new era is dawning for largely unregulated financial institutions, and rightly so. The huge systemic risks associated with hedge funds and other unregulated firms in the financial system have a ruinous potential in our economy. Yet these bodies have been allowed to operate with a minimal level of oversight for years. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s call for an expansion of financial regulation and increased transparency faces a long struggle through Congress but will prove a crucial framework for promoting future...
...Which raises the question, one that trade economists have to answer every 10 years or so: If protectionism is so ruinous, why does everyone reach for it in tough times? To answer that, you have to go back to why trade is good for you. The idea that an exchange of what you have for what I have makes both of us better off must be as old as the first moment anyone swapped cowrie shells for some cooked fish. Organized trade is ancient: silk did not get to Rome because the Romans figured out sericulture; someone imported it from...
...have to be destitute not to be able to afford a fire. You have to be just as poor not to afford salt and sugar. And you have to have ruinous public sanitation not to be able to filter out the feces of an infected person from the water supply (ingesting fecal matter is the most common way for cholera to spread). So it is a stark indication of how far Zimbabwe has fallen that a country that used to export food is now in the grip of a cholera epidemic that the World Health Organization (WHO) says has claimed...
...With his authority draining, Musharraf was forced to make a series of ruinous concessions. Washington urged him to broaden his political base and enter a power-sharing agreement with the late Benazir Bhutto. Musharraf allowed Bhutto to come back to Pakistan, and Sharif returned weeks later. In the face of domestic and international pressure, Musharraf had to shed his uniform - the source of much of his authority. Matters grew worse when Bhutto was assassinated in Rawalpindi in late December. And a relatively free and fair general election in February stripped Musharraf of a loyal government as his allies suffered...
...this really is the beginning of the end for Mugabe, it will have significance throughout Africa, where the years since Ghana first won its freedom in 1957 have been a serial, tragic disappointment, marked by war, genocide, poverty and famine. At the root of them all was ruinous leadership. With few exceptions, Africa's postindependence leaders wrested their continent back from colonial rule only to plunder it afresh. Contemptuous of their own people and often destined for a bloody end, many contrived to make their nations poorer than they were in colonial times...