Word: eras
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...era where MySpace usage is growing at a phenomenal rate, Wikipedia has over five million entries and users are posting their video commentary along with exploding Diet Coke/Mentos videos. Yet message boards devoted to financial information, as well as a myriad of other topics, continue to thrive - even in a time when most mainstream online participation is user reviews and blog commentary. And as we've seen with many Web 2.0 applications, anonymity, a key feature of message board postings, can call into question the veracity and motive of the boards' content...
That something is the close of a remarkable era of easy money. Cheap credit helped fuel the stock bubble at the end of the past millennium and almost entirely fueled the real estate boom of the first years of this millennium. It kept us spending through the tough years that followed the stock market's collapse, and it allowed the Bush Administration to finance big budget deficits without strain. Easy money also helped enable the rise of private equity as a major economic force...
...though, it's history. With each new market minipanic this year, interest rates have gone up a tad, lending standards have gotten a little tighter, and the easy-money era has receded further. Rates are still low by historic standards, and some kinds of loans are still cheaper than they were last summer. But the economy was growing at more than 3% then. This year it has sputtered. Interest rates are supposed to sink when that happens. They haven...
...borrowed money to purchase the likes of Chrysler and Hilton) but don't necessarily presage a crash. The Federal Government, which gets an ever higher percentage of its revenue from the minority of taxpayers who are profiting from the global boom, is making out O.K. as well. But the era of easy money, when ordinary Americans could count on borrowing their way out of trouble, looks to be over...
...lobbying Republicans to reach the 60-vote threshold needed to prevent a filibuster. "We think that would be unconscionable in this case," says Zherka, evoking the more contentious civil rights debates of the 1960s. "There hasn't been a filibuster attempt on a voting-rights act since the segregation era." Of course, the bill first needs to come up for debate. Sen. Harry Reid, the Democratic majority leader from Nevada, has promised to schedule time for the bill if passage looks likely. But getting it to the floor this month - the professed goal of its supporters - will be difficult with...