Word: meltdowns
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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...option adjustable-rate mortgage the next subprime disaster? For anyone who remembers that souring subprime loans kicked off the real estate meltdown, that's a scary thought. Recent analysis from Standard & Poor's (S&P) anticipates that a full 37.5% of such loans (dubbed option ARMs) that were written in 2007, at the height of lax lending, will eventually go bad. The kicker is that most option ARMs undergo payment spikes after five years, which means the brunt of the impact has yet to be felt. That will change in late 2010, delivering another blow to the fragile housing market...
...Health-care legislation—poorly marketed from the beginning—has stalled, and with the election of Scott Brown to the Senate, might not be revived until the end of the year, if at all. Banks and financial companies that played a major role in our economic meltdown have not been regulated effectively and, in some cases, were even allowed to reward their top employees with large bonuses while surviving off the taxpayers’ money. Lobbyists and corporate cash still control the electoral fates of many officials and the Supreme Court’s ill-advised decision...
...would be nice to have a permanent Yucca Mountain-style repository for spent nuclear fuel, but for now plants have been storing their waste on-site without major problems. And the nuclear industry's safety record has improved dramatically in the 30 years since the Three Mile Island meltdown, although there are still occasional blips like the recent radioactive leak at a Vermont plant. The NRC is not exactly a hostile regulator, but sometimes it shows teeth: in October, it identified problems with the Westinghouse AP1000 reactor design, which could create additional delays for nearly half of the proposed...
...CFPA wouldn't address the root causes of the crisis. Warren argues that the financial meltdown of 2008 was essentially a consumer-protection meltdown, a direct result of exploitative loans that never should have been approved. It's certainly true that the securities that sparked the crisis began imploding after subprime borrowers began struggling to repay the underlying loans. Still, the notion that a CFPA would have prevented the mess is debatable at best. It's not as if all borrowers who bit off more than they could chew were deceived; many of them just wanted more house than they...
...this kind of big-money speculation by hedge funds and private-equity funds generally beneficial, or can it exacerbate an already bad situation in the real economy, just as derivatives did in the case of the subprime-mortgage meltdown...