Word: washingtonitis
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Then again, decisions made by Congress, the Bush and Clinton administrations and federal regulators in the years before the crisis also played a key role in allowing things to get so bad. From ill-considered deregulation of banking and derivatives to over-the-top encouragement of home ownership, Washington's fingerprints were all over the crisis. Almost nothing has been done so far to right these wrongs, or otherwise rein in the excesses of the financial system. Which brings us to lesson No. 3: It's really hard for a democracy to make big changes in the absence of crisis...
Scientists make up the bulk of the other award winners: Dee Boersma, a marine biologist at the University of Washington who found that the effects of climate change force penguins in Antarctica to swim 25 extra miles for food, putting them in greater danger of extinction. Ashok Gadgil, an environmental engineer at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, won for inventing simple, inexpensive water-purification systems and stoves for use in the developing world. Kirk Smith, a scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, was recognized for his work connecting indoor air pollution - mostly from cooking - to the premature death...
Last January, the same week Obama was inaugurated, Stein received a phone call from former University President Lawrence H. Summers, now head of the National Economic Council, asking if he would come to Washington to help work on the economic recovery plan...
Throughout the experience in Washington, Stein explains, there was a great sense of urgency. At the worst point, “you felt like you were staring into the abyss...
Stein’s return hardly marks the end of the line for Harvard’s presence in Washington. Yesterday, Business School Professor David S. Scharfstein began work with the administration. Scharfstein could not be reached for comment over the last week...