Word: slump
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Thursday brought dreaded confirmation that markets look set to remain in tank mode until they find reason for taking heart anew. In addition to the 11.4% slump of Nikkei - its biggest single-day drop since the October, 1987 crash - trading Thursday elsewhere in Asia pushed Hong Kong's Hang Seng down 4.8%, South Korea's down 9.44%, and Singapore Straights Times Index down 5.5%. Europe faired no better, with London's FTSE 100 and Paris' CAC 40 indices reflecting mid-morning declines of nearing 2.5%, and Frankfurt's Dax off 1.3%. Market commentators warned that trading could see-saw throughout...
...lengthy productivity slump beginning in the early 1970s that created concern among economists such as Krugman. Low productivity growth explained much of what had gone wrong with the U.S. economy: stagnant wages, high inflation, ground lost to Japan. But what caused it? The most convincing explanation came from Northwestern University's Robert J. Gordon. In the early and mid-20th century, he argued, the U.S. benefited from a spectacular confluence of technological innovation involving electricity, the internal combustion engine, petrochemicals and communications. By the 1970s the economic impact of innovation in these fields had waned, and nothing came along...
...dream locales, but two destinations trump all others: Bali and the southern Thai island of Phuket. It is on these two chunks of land, a mere 2,400 square miles (6,200 sq km) combined, that thousands of expatriates have bought tropical vacation homes. Indeed, a global real estate slump notwithstanding, Bali and Phuket's residential sectors are still booming, in part because most of the foreign-owned property on these two islands isn't bank-financed. In Bali, despite a pair of terrorist bombings in 2002 and '05, land prices have increased by at least 20% annually over...
...everyone is so lucky. Recent industry research shows that falling purchasing power and consumer fear of a looming economic downturn have caused spending in France's cafés and restaurants to slump around 20% this year. Nearly 3,000 of the nation's restaurants closed down or went bankrupt in the first half of 2008 alone. That wave of failure may well rise as newcomers to the sector who relied on credit to get started find themselves stretched to make their payments as revenues slump. "If I were 30, starting out with loans to reimburse...
...Rafael Martín, the mayor of the town of Alameda de la Sagra, says he's most concerned about the impact of the slump on his neighbors, some of whom are already in difficult circumstances because their mortgage payments have jumped while their shifts have been reduced. "It doesn't just affect the people who work in the brick factories," he notes. "It affects the truckers who transport the bricks, and the mechanics who take care of the trucks, and eventually even the bars where those workers go for a drink. It's like the fish that bites...