Word: slump
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...fuel bills. Repossessions are expected to soar by two-thirds this year to some 45,000. The result: property prices look set to fall further. Halifax, Britain's leading mortgage lender, forecasts "a mid-single-digit percentage decline" in 2008; Capital Economics, a London-based consultancy, predicts a slump of as much as 20% between last fall...
...still nascent downturn in the British market exposes more than just property investments. The social and cultural value of home ownership in the U.K. makes any slump more difficult to shoulder. The roots of this love affair with property go deep. For centuries, a house of one's own gave an Englishman not just privacy and status; until 1832, those in the countryside had no right to vote without property of a certain value. Small wonder, suggests Stuart Lowe, a housing expert at the University of York, that the English dream of home ownership has become "a deep cultural issue...
Whatever it takes, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown will be praying that the market stays afloat. Trailing in the polls behind the Conservative opposition, the last thing his beleaguered Labour government needs is a messy collapse of the housing sector. Labour was in opposition during the last slump, and has since invoked it as a peril of Tory government. To head off the worst this time, Labour ministers announced plans on May 9 to extend debt-advice services and free legal representation to those at risk of losing their homes. Yet just days later, as Housing Minister Caroline Flint entered...
...Ortiz hitting? With the Yankees playing as if they are human, Manny Ramirez exploding, and J.D. Drew returning to the form of his youth, Big Papi is just getting a slump out of the way when the Sox can afford to absorb it. When the team urgently needs him, which they will, he will do as he has always done: bend down to pick up the mortals around him and single-handedly carry them on his back. Alternative explanation: Julio Lugo gave Ortiz hitting tips in the Dominican Republic in the off season...
...field. So we must replace our negative fears about what is wrong with absolute certainty that this will pass so that our confidence in him can restore his confidence in himself. P.S. In the 1950s, when Brooklyn Dodger first baseman Gil Hodges was in an equally terrible slump, entire parishes prayed for him. And I gave him my St. Christopher's medal blessed by the Pope. The slump dramatically ended. As a seven-year-old I was sure that I had made it happen...