Word: turning
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...other reason that mortgage modifications are a challenging way to put a floor under housing prices is that this assumes that people who cannot afford a $500 a month mortgage payment can afford a payment of only $350. But in most cases this does not matter. As people turn away from debt and toward savings, a house is no longer a good mattress in which to store cash. Perhaps more to the point, with joblessness on the rise and many middle class household budgets built around two people working full-time, it does not take much bad luck to undermine...
...think for a minute that all this lavish spending at the Grand Palais in Paris might be an indication of a positive turn of events for the world's economy. Indeed, it may be just the opposite. David Nahmad, one of the world's top private art dealers who doubles as a major world currency trader, says the eagerness to invest cash in art is a very visible confirmation of the skepticism that investors have about the crippled financial system. "People today don't know where to put their money. The banks are fragile, the hedge funds don't exist...
...Colombian traffickers. Many of those caught in the net are small-fry - like the smuggler's driver, the document forger or the guy who prepared the box lunches for the crews of the go-fast boats. Once in U.S. custody, many high-level smugglers do cop pleas and then turn on one another, allowing prosecutors to weaken their organizations, says Josh Levine, former chief of the international narcotics trafficking unit of the U.S. Attorney's office for the southern district of New York. Prosecutors also note that little guys often help build cases against the capos. But Perez estimates that...
...surprisingly, the political ABCs often trump purely judicial considerations. In the post-Escobar era, paramilitary commanders emerged as some of Colombia's most dangerous narco-criminals. By deftly holding the sword of extradition on drug charges over their heads, Uribe convinced dozens of these warlords to turn themselves in and demobilize their troops. Those who cooperated and confessed were eligible for light sentences. But soon these death-squad leaders began implicating political allies of the President, including lawmakers, army officers, the government's spy chief and even Uribe's cousin, who was forced to resign from the Senate...
...heyday of the Medellin and Cali cartels, motorcycle-mounted assassins shot down judges and witnesses while kingpins ran their drug empires from behind bars. Now Colombia has a modern maximum-security prison to lock down high-risk criminals. The judiciary, in turn, has switched from a written system to oral and accusatory trials similar to those in U.S. courts, making it harder for narcos to manipulate the proceedings. Still, many law-enforcement experts vigorously defend extradition as narco-traffickers now try to rig the system in more subtle ways. Last year, Guillermo Valencia Cossio, chief government prosecutor for Medell...