Word: panic
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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When Hermogenes Marrero was in Marine boot camp, he recalls being the only recruit who didn't panic during simulated-chemical-warfare drills. "I'd sit there calmly with my gas mask on," Marrero says, "while a lot of other guys got scared and ran away." It was 1969, and Marrero, a New Yorker born in Puerto Rico, was fresh out of high school at the age of 17. But his composure caught the eyes of Marine instructors - and the next year, he says, he was at Camp Garcia on the Puerto Rican island of Vieques, helping guard...
...Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department pointedly refused to bail the company out, and no other Wall Street outfit was willing to step into the breach. It was the largest bankruptcy ever in the U.S., but the really big news was what happened afterward. First came a financial panic that threatened to shatter the global capitalist order, then came an unprecedented, and unprecedentedly expensive, effort by governments on both sides of the Atlantic to patch things...
Three main lessons present themselves. First, our complex financial system is awfully fragile. Second, government action is capable of keeping a financial panic from snowballing into a complete economic disaster along the lines of the Great Depression. Third, the government has - in large part because of its success in averting disaster - found it difficult to take any actions that would make the financial system less fragile in the future. That would, apparently, be too much government intervention...
...people arguing this case on CNBC and even on the floor of the House of Representatives. But after Lehman's failure, no one at Treasury or the Fed talked that way. Instead, the consensus among the policymakers who mattered, in the U.S. and overseas, was that the panic had to be stopped at any cost...
Then came the Panic of '08. Investors saw Treasuries as a safe haven and poured money into them, driving down interest rates. Officials in Washington spared no expense in battling the crisis. The result is a deficit of unprecedented size but with no perceptible pressure from financial markets to reduce it. No pressure so far, at least. The federal debt, at $7.6 trillion, is now above 50% of GDP and rising. The government faces commitments to Social Security and Medicare that dwarf that figure. Republican congressional leaders have decided they care about deficits again - and seem to be making headway...