Word: zeros
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...into savings. Mark Zandi of Regional Financial Associates, an economic forecasting firm, figures credit-card, auto and personal loans outstanding rose 7% by the end of February over a year earlier, while the personal-savings rate over the three months ending in February, averaged a fat, round zero. Consumers caught between slowly rising incomes and more burdensome debt and fewer savings do not just feel pinched; they...
...late November, the temperature outside hovered near zero, and six of us were sitting fully clothed in an unused basement bathhouse beneath a rundown hotel in central Russia. The water in the green-tiled pool had long ago turned an oily, opaque black, and from the cavernous banquet room directly above our heads rock music reverberated. Hardly an ideal venue for a business meeting, but there are few safe places to discuss the sale of 200 lbs. of stolen emeralds...
...peak in the early 1960s, Ionesco attracted such collaborators as Jean-Louis Barrault, who magically staged A Stroll in the Air; Laurence Olivier and Zero Mostel, who both played the lead in Rhinoceros (with Mostel winning a Tony Award on Broadway); and Alec Guinness, who starred in Exit the King, a Lear-like portrait of the inevitability of death. Ionesco was hailed as someone who might bridge the gap between literature and entertainment. Instead, his work grew more remote and austere, and his audiences dwindled. His last play, Journeys Among the Dead, was withdrawn before opening in New York City...
...trillion dollars in mortgages is now bound up in mortgage-backed securities, up from zero two decades ago. All told, there's a huge speculative overlay on stocks, bonds, mortgages, corn, hogs, etc., owned by regular people in the real world, which the derivative people refer to as "the underlying." These abstract concoctions are floating over the real world of stocks, bonds, corn and hogs in the same way that the island of Laputa, that fanciful domain of theorizers and stargazers, floated over real towns and villages in Gulliver's Travels...
Derivatives, which are based on such real assets as stocks and bonds, work like most professional betting games. They have a zero-sum outcome, always producing a winner and a loser. The bettors put up their money, and the people who run the casino -- a bank, a brokerage house or an insurance company -- figure out ways to pass on the risks. Companies use derivatives to hedge against changes in interest rates, foreign-exchange rates and commodities prices. Mutual funds and pension funds use them to protect their stock and bond investments. Major banks, brokerage firms and insurance companies write them...