Word: shapes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Greenspan's challenges will increase in the coming year. Aside from a softening economy, the shape of finance and credit in the U.S. is changing. More than a decade of ever loosening regulation of credit terms and conditions led first to financial debacles in savings-and-loan associations and currently to widespread concern about the health of many banks in general. Says Robert Litan, a senior fellow at Brookings Institution: "One could make the case that our banking system is more fragile now than at any time before a recession...
Military strategists complain that they have to shape plans for a decade in a situation that changes explosively from week to week. But that danger is no excuse for not beginning to draw up a strategic plan to guide the reductions that a budget crunch is forcing on the U.S. no less than on the Soviet Union. Nor should it be allowed to obscure the happy prospects now beckoning Washington and Moscow alike...
That may be a lost cause. There were growing signs that a concerted attack on the conservatives was taking shape. The French daily Le Monde reported that Gorbachev aides were warning their boss that conservative forces were not just putting the brakes on reform but were trying to build their popular support from the public's discontent and anxiety. The Soviet leader, they urged, must learn the lessons of the East European revolution and come down firmly on the side of radical reform, instead of straddling the fence between liberals and conservatives. In fact, a second rumor was circulating...
Since taking office, De Klerk has often spoken of a "new South Africa." The shape of that new nation is still -- deliberately -- undefined. But one phrase is firmly inked in: "group rights," De Klerk's code name for the preservation of white privilege. In South Africa, when whites talk about "minority rights" they mean the protection of white power and wealth, and when they refer to "the tyranny of the majority" they mean black rule. De Klerk's so-called multiracial state does not denote racial integration but a system in which each race will have its own rights...
...expectations have been raised. For many, the release of Mandela is meant to signal the beginning of the end of apartheid. Now anything less than an agreement between white and black about the shape of the future will be a bitter disappointment. De Klerk knows this, and he must find some middle path that will satisfy both sides. Yet it must be more than apartheid with a human face. "His mandate is somehow to maintain white supremacy without alienating the black majority," says Alan Morris, an anti-apartheid activist and sociology lecturer at the University of the Witwatersrand...