Word: steep
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...symptom of everything wrong with Washington. The 2003 bill barred the government from negotiating for lower drug prices for its 43 million Medicare recipients. Instead, that task was delegated to private insurers and their agents, who Democrats argued - and still argue - don't have the muscle to get the steep discounts that a huge government program could. "Direct negotiation for lower prescription-drug prices is directly related to our lobbying- and ethics-reform legislation," Rahm Emanuel, then the chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, told the New York Times in January 2007. Both were needed, he said, "to make sure...
...largely to its acquisition in January of HBOS, the troubled U.K. lender heavily exposed to Britain's declining property market. Still, you can't fault Lloyds' optimism. The bank, in which the government has a 43% stake, predicted "high single-digit income growth" within two years. Analysts expect a steep hike in provisions for bad loans when Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), Britain's largest taxpayer-funded lender, unveils first-half results later this week. After falling to a $40 billion loss last year, the largest in U.K. corporate history, RBS - more than two-thirds of it in government hands...
...four provinces and five cities 10% discounts if they trade old electronic goods for new ones. The amounts allocated have been criticized as piddling, but their inclusion in the stimulus spending indicates that China's planners recognize the importance of domestic consumption as a driver of growth, given the steep fall in demand for Chinese exports because of the U.S. recession...
Yoshimi Inaba, the new head of Toyota's operations in the U.S., says the company's inventories have dropped to manageable levels (estimates put it at 47 days). However, the cost has been steep. Toyota's operations in the U.S. are no longer profitable and Toyota overall probably can't make a profit if it's losing money in North America, Inaba has acknowledged. (See the best cars from the 2009 Detroit Auto Show...
...them is the China story. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development recently revised its GDP growth forecasts for the country from 6.3% to 7.7% in 2009 and from 8.5% to 9.3% in 2010, on the back of government stimulus spending that appears to be making up for a steep drop in exports. The World Bank has also raised its 2009 forecast from 6.5% to 7.2%, and projects that China will replace Japan as the world's second largest economy in two years. (See 10 things to do in Shanghai...