Word: ultra
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...brought down the firm - financial products and stock-lending - didn't understand what they were doing. Financial products wrote credit-default swaps - sorry I'm not pausing to explain them, but most eyes would glaze over if I did - that they thought were riskless but turned out to be ultra-risky...
Main Street has paid a price for the ultra-low interest rates the Fed has kept in place to encourage banks to lend and to keep commerce flowing. Cheap money is nice for lenders and borrowers - but it's devastating for savers, especially for retirees who use interest income to supplement Social Security. If you had $500,000 stashed away - not a bad nest egg - you could earn a no-risk $20,000 to $25,000 annually (before taxes) two years ago buying bank CDs or short-term Treasury securities. Now you earn less than $5,000 in an average...
...main storyline chronicles the dissolution of the close friendship between the straitlaced and ultra-successful Darren and the rebellious, insecure Steve (Josh Hutcherson). Each teen deals with his own emotional baggage: Darren fends off the suffocation of his upper-middle class suburban milieu and his father’s chant of “College! Job! Family!” while Steve copes with an absent father and an alcoholic mother...
...Guido Jouret, who oversees Cisco's emerging technologies, explained this creative destruction when we talked over TelePresence, an ultra-high-definition substitute for the hassle, expense and carbon footprint of business travel. We were 3,000 miles (4,800 km) apart, but I kept forgetting we weren't at the same conference table. One of Steven Spielberg's cinematographers helped Cisco get the illusion of intimacy just right. "California has a very welcoming attitude, but it's a Darwinian society," Jouret said. "Companies come and grow and die, and no one sheds a tear. And there's a real sense...
...locking in huge outlays for various goodies, as well as the notorious Proposition 13, which has severely restricted local property taxes since 1978. California is also one of only three states that need a two-thirds supermajority to pass a budget or raise taxes, a virtual impossibility in its ultra-partisan legislature. So it relies on a boom-and-bust tax base that even many liberals admit is overreliant on the rich. The state's economy actually grew last year, but its revenues crashed because its top earners had lower incomes and capital gains. That meant sharp cutbacks, especially...