Word: spooks
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...conference. That incident was just the latest example of regulators trying to control an unruly market. With a total capitalization of only $121 billion?far less than half of Microsoft's current market cap of $295 billion?the Stock Exchange of Thailand (SET) is dominated by small investors who spook as easily as a school of herring, causing volatile price fluctuations. During a roaring market last year (the Thai market's 116% gain in 2003 was tops among the world's exchanges), regulators tried to put the brakes on rampant speculation by tightening day-trading rules...
Bamford maintains that before 9/11, the U.S.'s entire spook network was pretty much out to lunch. It was a community that had done its job well in the cold war and was looking for a reason to exist. By the late 1990s the NSA was becoming obsolete, unable to keep up with the pace of technological change. The NSA netted millions more conversations at its worldwide listening posts than it could translate or interpret. The agency spent billions to eavesdrop on chatter overseas that moved by satellite--only to see the world move to harder-to-steal digitized cellular...
...challenge to wage war on the Soviets, and it suited the U.S. to help rally anti-Soviet sentiment in the Islamic world, particularly among Sunni elements naturally at odds with Iran. That's why a number of former intelligence personnel regard the emergence of the Qaeda phenomenon as 'blowback,' spook jargon for the unintended consequences of a covert operation. What the U.S. and its allies had helped to do in Afghanistan was assemble an international brigade of radical Islamists - hardly natural allies of the West, but nonetheless an extremely useful proxy in the immediate task of "bleeding the Soviets...
...corporate ledgers with impunity--and they're raking in money doing so. "Auditors and audit committees are now in the catbird seat," says Harvard Business School professor Jay Lorsch. Companies no longer feel free to dump their auditors, for fear of sparking a public spat; no one wants to spook jittery investors, provoke shareholder lawsuits or another regulatory crackdown. "There's more respect for the auditor," says Julie Lindy, editor of Bowman's Accounting Report. "Companies no longer think the audit process is about creating the illusion that they're jumping through hoops...
With a political statement this pungent, Le Carre knows he runs the risk of alienating his sizable American following, even of coming off as a crank--an aging, forgotten ex-spook railing at the world from his Cornish crag. He also knows that he is leaving behind the sense of moral ambiguity that permeated his most acclaimed novels, trading those many delicate, literary shades of gray for a palette of clear-cut black and white. He has taken a stand. "I have a kind of middle-class constituency of fans who don't want me shaking the bars," he says...