Word: interestingly
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...Chinese government has quickly awakened to the threat of a sharp slowdown. Until a few months ago, Beijing's top priority had been fighting inflation. Now policymakers are easing off the brakes and hitting the gas again in an effort to stimulate growth. The central bank lowered its benchmark interest rate twice in the past 45 days, the first cuts since 2002. In mid-October, the State Council announced plans to increase infrastructure spending, to offer tax rebates for exporters and to boost government-controlled prices for agricultural products. Beijing is also widely expected to introduce measures to resuscitate...
...debt binge was fueled by easy money and the belief that prices of assets - those of houses in particular - never went down; only interest rates did. That era is over. It will be replaced by what will be one of the more painful, and consequential, economic chapters in our history: the great deleveraging of America. On Wall Street, the largest financial institutions on the planet are reducing their debt and trying to build up capital, which once upon a time was the seed corn of their business, and now must be again. Retail banks like Wachovia and investment banks like...
...seen this movie before, and it's not a happy one. Japan's financial sector imploded in the 1990s as bubbles in real estate and stock prices (sound familiar?) burst. Eventually, Japan's central bank drove interest rates to near zero to stimulate the economy. But it was, as the economists say, "pushing on a string." Banks were reluctant to lend because they needed to hoard capital to repair their balance sheets - just as they need to do now in the U.S. Economic growth slowed, and demand for the credit that was available diminished. The result was Japan's infamous...
...good news is that most economists believe all the weaponry the government is throwing at the problem will eventually have an effect. Interest rates are low and probably headed lower. More fiscal stimulus is on the way. Many economists are currently forecasting a couple of quarters of outright economic contraction. But many see a resumption of slow growth by the second half of next year. The sky, in other words, is not necessarily falling...
...year-old Beijing native, whose real name is Shen Jing, fashions music from the seemingly random meldings of traditional Chinese instruments, bleeps and bloops worthy of a sci-fi B movie, and an ethereal, at times unnerving, operatic voice. "I have a strong interest in the cosmos, so a lot of my music tends to describe those feelings," she says...