Word: britishers
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...alone, governments from Germany to Iceland rushed to prop up five ailing financial institutions with huge cash infusions or full-blown nationalization, making it one of the grimmest days in the history of European finance. Among the high-profile casualties were Fortis, Belgium's largest bank; the venerable British mortgage lender Bradford & Bingley; and Germany's Hypo Real Estate, which has a massive $560 billion balance sheet and is a big player in the domestic securities market. As the governments stepped in, the message they sent to the public was supposed to be reassuring: Don't panic - your money...
Fortunately, that sort of panic - which brought down British lender Northern Rock a year ago - was the exception. But the loss of confidence underlying it is every banker's worst nightmare - and every bank regulator's, too. At Bradford & Bingley, staff were given forms to hand out to customers explaining what had happened and why their money was safe. Elsewhere, it was national authorities who sought to reassure, most notably in Ireland, where the government announced an unprecedented $560 billion guarantee to cover the deposits and debts of the nation's six biggest banks for the next two years...
This would not have been the position most people would have predicted for Piano in 1977, when he became suddenly famous for one of the funniest buildings of all time. The Georges Pompidou Center in Paris, which he co-designed with the British architect Richard Rogers, is a museum that's been disemboweled, its brightly colored ventilation tubes, pipes and escalator draped along the exterior in a riot of externalized intestines...
...Democratic activist, had grown tired of waiting for the Big Three oil companies to tap their huge natural-gas reserves in the state's North Slope, the long swatch of northern Alaska tundra that includes the largest oil and gas fields in North America. For decades, ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips and British Petroleum had little incentive to sell the trillions of cubic feet of natural gas that shares space beneath the ice with all those oil deposits. Gas is less profitable than oil and much harder to move to market. The majors could afford to wait until the economics of gas were...
...misfortune. Things are too serious for that. But there is a palpable sense that the financial crisis, and Washington's stumbling reaction to it, represents a defining moment. The days when the U.S. could lecture other nations on the correct way to run their affairs are gone. The British philosopher John Gray put the case at its starkest in the Observer: "The era of American global leadership, reaching back to the Second World War," Gray wrote, "is over...