Word: steepest
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Faced with troubling signs of a stalling recovery, investors sent the U.S. stock market down sharply on June 15. At the day's close, the Standard & Poor's 500 Index was off 2.4%, with the steepest drops suffered by major banks and commodity producers. Bank of America, the most actively traded stock during the day, saw its price shed nearly 2.8%. The Dow fell 2.1% to close...
...Western governments were pleading with Persian Gulf oil states to ramp up production as oil sped toward $150 a barrel; today, OPEC is twisting off the spigot in an attempt to support crude prices around $50. The International Energy Agency expects oil demand to fall this year at the steepest rate since the early 1980s. Some experts believe prices may stay depressed for years to come, due to greater energy efficiency, technological improvements in oil production and greater availability of alternative fuels such as biofuels. (Read a brief history of the oil barrel...
...just a few months ago; air traffic is way down. Exports from Japan were almost 50% less in February compared with the same month in 2008; China's exports were down 26% in February. The World Trade Organization is predicting global trade will shrink by 9% this year, the steepest annual decline since World War II. This contraction is not only deep, it is also a latter-day rarity: global trade has increased continuously year after year since 1982. (Read "The Threat of a Global Trade...
...Both Menkhaus and von Hippel caution that Somalia's new government faces the steepest of obstacles. Even without the Islamists, 18 years of war have robbed it of almost all infrastructure and anything resembling law, left millions of its people on the edge of starvation and given it a raging piracy problem along its coasts. But both warn that the world should not flood Somalia with help. Von Hippel said experience had shown that international peacekeepers or a U.N.-sponsored drive to create a central government were inappropriate to Somalia. Far more important was building up Somalia's own security...
Asia has suffered recessions before, of course. But this downturn is different. Unlike in 1997-98 and 2001-02, Asia's favorite customer--the American consumer--is drastically cutting back. Consumer spending in the U.S. dropped at a rate of 4.3% in the fourth quarter of 2008, the steepest quarterly decline since 1980. Because roughly 25% of Asia's exports ultimately end up in the U.S., the region's manufacturing powerhouses are helpless to counteract this crash. Trade among Asian countries is also plummeting, since much of this intraregional commerce is indirectly dependent on the West. A high percentage...