Word: slumps
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...stock prices shooting up again after a week of historic losses. But it's still far too early to celebrate. The measures need to prove their effectiveness by unfreezing lending. And there's still the huge challenge - no less urgent than fixing the banking system - of preventing an economic slump...
...permanence," says Greg Priddy, oil analyst for the Eurasia Group in Washington. Instead of believing that gas prices would finally fall again, many began changing their daily habits - they started driving the smaller car in a two-car garage or consolidating shopping trips. That has meant a huge slump in Americans' gas use. Even before the market meltdown, Americans consumed 800,000 barrels of oil a day less during the first half of this year than the same period last year. As demand fell, so did prices, and as prices have fallen, investors have begun pulling money...
...rich countries the slump has come at a bad time. As the oil price began rising during the past few years, governments and big oil companies plowed billions into exploring and developing new fields in Russia, Angola, Mexico, Brazil and Saudi Arabia - projects whose costs have more than doubled in the past few years, in part because soaring steel prices drove up drilling equipment costs and oil-rig rentals. Just as global demand has begun to slow, millions more barrels of oil a day from new fields have hit the world market...
...become an issue," says Andrew Goodwin, a senior economist at Oxford Economics, who nonetheless believes that while "there is a concern about dependency, financial services have done well historically." At the Guildhall, which is where the City administration is based, policy head Stuart Fraser is bracing for a slump as severe as the one in the early '90s, when house prices collapsed and unemployment soared. Still, he adds, "It's like the aircraft industry. A plane will crash occasionally but what you don't do is stop flying...
...decision to cut interest rates could cheer Asian investors concerned that a deep economic slump in the West will derail Asia's export-driven economies. The quandary facing Asia's policymakers is that credit is tightening and stocks are plunging due to circumstances mostly beyond their control. "Central banks in Asia don't have the ability to fix the problem," said Kirby Daley, senior strategist at financial services firm Newedge Group in Hong Kong...