Word: trillions
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...world's oceans of legitimate payments. The multibillion-dollar flow of black money, the profits from criminal enterprise, moves through the world's financial institutions as part of a vastly larger quantity of gray money, as bankers call it. This dubious, laundered cash amounts to an estimated $1 trillion or more each year. Often legitimately earned, this money has an endless variety of sources: an Argentine businessman who dodges currency-control laws to get his savings out of the country; a multinational corporation that seeks to "minimize" its tax burden by dumping its profits in tax-free havens; a South...
...management at such agencies as the Veterans Administration and the Department of Energy may have allowed scandals rivaling the estimated $8 billion imbroglio at the Department of Housing and Urban Development to go undetected. But the gravest worries were triggered by concerns about the solvency of more than $5 trillion in federal credit and insurance programs that cover everything from bank deposits to student loans and Third World aid. While no one expects all such programs to fail, bad debts and write-offs are steadily increasing. "Losses from these programs have already cost the taxpayers tens of billions of dollars...
...report to Congress last month, the General Accounting Office described the same pattern of sloppy accounting and slack Government supervision that allowed the S&L debacle to go unchecked. Because many agencies kept such poor books, GAO auditors could not even determine how much of the $5 trillion is at risk of default. "The ignorance, incompetence and corruption in many of the Government loan and loan-guarantee programs are appalling," says Dingell...
...ALWAYS wondered how federal policymakers could be so oblivious to the size of the national debt. The United States now owe banks and foreign countries about $3 trillion, constituting a large chunk of our Gross National Product. Each year we spend more than $130 billion in interest payments on the debt--money America could otherwise use to solve several major national problems...
...that of Great Britain and roughly equal to that of the Netherlands. Nor was it any more one-sided than that of the Dutch. Neither Japan nor any other country imminently threatens to gain economic control over the U.S., whose nonbank multinational corporations have assets totaling well over $5 trillion...