Word: third world
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...midst of a slump that could swiftly spread to America's trading partners. Japanese investors have lost nearly $2 trillion of wealth as shares on the Tokyo Stock Exchange declined more than 40% since last December. The stunned Japanese are paring back their lending just as Eastern Europe and Third World nations desperately seek cash to pay runaway oil bills...
Aggravating the slump is a worldwide credit crunch that affects everyone from auto shoppers to Third World governments. Many lenders who were burned by bad loans in the 1980s are now prudent to a fault. Says Jacobs: "The banks are basically pushing panic buttons everywhere. They are saying, 'We don't care about your situation, we want our money now.' " At the same time, the big cash exporters of the 1980s now have little to spare. Japan, which was a net buyer of $26 billion in U.S. bonds last year, dumped them to the tune of $9 billion...
...sagging U.S. economy will send tremors around the globe. Since Americans are the world's biggest spenders on everything from Colombian coffee to Japanese cameras, a slowdown in U.S. buying cuts deeply into the revenue of foreign countries. That means more pain for impoverished Third World countries and slower growth for wealthy U.S. trading partners...
...credit crunch and oil shock will cause new suffering in Third World countries, which already bear an overload of political and economic woes. In one of the most seriously affected nations, Bangladesh, officials estimate that the gulf crisis will cost the impoverished country $220 million a year in higher oil prices and $100 million in lost remittances from Bangladeshi workers who have fled Kuwait and Iraq. The Philippines, which imports almost all its oil, will have to borrow heavily to keep its factories running and prevent unemployment from soaring above the present rate of 12.6%. Deepening Third World troubles will...
...Soviet Union -- might not have found the stakes so high or the crisis quite so threatening. It has not penetrated our imagination that in a world where the powerful, industrialized nation-states are at last at peace, there might be other ways to face down a pint-size Third World warrior state than with massive force of arms. Nor have we begun to see what an anachronism we are in danger of becoming: a warrior nation in a world that pines for peace, a high- tech state with the values of a warrior band...