Word: plastic money
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...tyrant has stockpiled much of the country's wealth for himself: his fortune is estimated at several hundred million dollars. "The Guide," as he has dubbed himself, lavished much of that money on empty show. When rebel looters in Goma recently entered the President's local villa--a mansion Mobutu visited just once, but kept ready for his imminent return--they found a house full of plastic "marble" and fake antiques. Other expressions of his grandeur are not so hollow: he owns chateaus in Spain and Belgium, a town house in Paris and a horse ranch in Portugal. Such abuse...
...Dole couldn't really afford enemies. All those double-date press conferences during the budget negotiations looked like a buddy movie with Newt the star and Dole the sidekick. If Newt were really Dole's friend, he wouldn't be running around the country swinging a plastic bucket to symbolize all the money the revolution saved on congressional ice deliveries while his standard-bearer is trying to make the country forget there ever was a revolution...
...ambitious project will join a host of so-called E-money experiments that are popping up around the globe. The goal is to replace cash and checks with electronic transactions that cost just pennies to process. Citibank, a leader in this push for a cashless society, is developing what it calls an Electronic Monetary System that will permit consumers and companies to make payments electronically anywhere in the world. Visa, fresh off a test of 300,000 smart cards--plastic embedded with a cache of electronic cash--at the Atlanta Olympics, will soon launch similar projects in 14 other countries...
...reason for the increase in bankruptcies: banks. As the debt keeps building, banks continue to flood mailboxes with solicitations of plastic cash--a record 2.7 billion offers were sent out last year. With interest rates that often exceed 18%, and with the banks' cost of money around 3%, credit cards now represent the banks' most profitable source of loans. Small wonder that consumer debt comprises about half of all bank lending, up from one-third a decade ago. Some lenders brazenly target new bankruptcy filers, who, for the following six years, are legally barred from declaring bankruptcy and walking away...
...kitchen sink--no, make that the whole kitchen. Some of the catalog entries for this show, listing title, date and materials, sound more like small towns than works of art: "The Ozymandias Parade, 1985. Tableau: wood, plastic, mirrored plexiglass, fiberglass horses, light bulbs, recorded music, paint, clothing, plaster casts, rubber, metal, galvanized sheet metal, polyester resin, wagon, pork barrel, suitcases, fake money, telephone, miniature flags, and toys, 147 x 349 x 180 [inches...