Word: softener
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...That isn't to say Daewoo's demise wasn't painful. The government and banks stage-managed Daewoo's unwinding to soften the blow to the economy. The group was broken apart. Some assets were sold. (Ironically, GM acquired some of Daewoo's car company.) Other affiliates got debt restructurings; a government agency bought up Daewoo loans from the financial sector at a discount. Billions were lost. But the whole concept that Daewoo was too big to fail proved false. The reality was that Daewoo had become more burden than boon. Many of the loans it had gobbled up were...
There was even bigger news from China, where the government announced a $586 billion stimulus package in an attempt to soften the blow of the coming recession. The China package was big and bold - and a tacit challenge to the Obama Administration. It represented 18% of the Chinese gross domestic product, the equivalent of a $2.4 trillion program in the U.S. Of course, China has bigger problems to solve than we do. Its social safety net is made of tissue; vast sums will be needed to establish a proper health-care and pension system. But much of the $586 billion...
...statement saying that during the call the President-elect had not endorsed the antimissile deployment but had simply repeated his strategically ambiguous position from the campaign. "[Obama] supports deploying a missile-defense system when the technology is proved to be workable," McDonough said. In an apparent attempt to soften Poland's embarrassment at being publicly contradicted, Obama had Vice President-elect Joe Biden quietly follow up with a call to Kaczynski on Monday, aides...
...Justice Minister Anibal Fernández accused Venezuelan-American businessman Guido Antonini Wilson, a Key Biscayne resident who collaborated with the FBI to secure the conviction of his former associate Frank Duran in Miami yesterday, of "being paid to say what he says." But that's unlikely to help soften the latest blow to a government reeling from a drastic fall in public approval ratings, and a loss of confidence in Argentina's peso...
...Sources familiar with the Tibetan stance say they have dropped almost all preconditions in talks with the Chinese and were seeking only a meeting between the spiritual leader and Chinese president Hu Jintao. but rather than soften their position, Chinese officials seemed to grow more aggressive since the middle of this year, most recently stating in July that the talks were not about the future of Tibet but about arrangements for the Dalai Lama's own future, including when he might be allowed to return to China. "That's exactly what caused the collapse of talks all the way back...