Every financial bubble has its popular phrases, initialisms and acronyms. In the 1980s they were junk bonds and LBOs. The most recent bubble offered CDOs, Option ARMS, Structured Notes and a virtual lexicon of complex and convoluted financing. Though it all started to fray early in 2008, the Sept. 15 bankruptcy filing by Lehman Brothers began a new, far more frightening chapter. Today the Lehman Brothers building in Manhattan carries the name of Britain’s Barclays bank, the stock market is [...]
Archive for September, 2009
A year ago today, the venerable investment-banking firm Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy protection after the 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, [...]
Categories: Business
For the past decade, the people of Trokavec, Czech Republic, have been convinced that America was positioning their quiet town of around 100, an hour south of Prague, as the center of a giant bullseye.
So when news was confirmed that the U.S. had scrapped plans to place part of a missile defense shield in a military zone near the town, Jan Neoral, the mayor of Trokavec and vocal anti-missile shield campaigner, announced with uncharacteristic understatement that President Barack Obama’s decision [...]
Categories: World
A planned deal that would place Microsoft Corp.’s Bing search tool on Yahoo Inc. search pages is being eyed by European antitrust regulators, according to a report Thursday.
Reuters reported that Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) is having informal talks with regulators in Europe about the deal.
The deal with Microsoft and Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Yahoo (NASDAQ:YHOO) is already being looked at by U.S. regulators.
Yahoo has agreed to use Bing on its Internet sites in return for 88 percent of the revenue from search [...]
Categories: World
Who Was There: Blizzard Entertainment cofounder and executive vice president of product development Frank Pearce and production director J. Allen Brack opened Thursday’s schedule of panels with a keynote address titled “The Universe of World of Warcraft.”
What They Talked About: In the GDC Austin schedule, Pearce and Brack’s keynote address is described as offering “an in-depth at the operational complexities of running a large-scale MMO.” While there has been no shortage of people to talk about the difficulties of developing [...]
This summer’s melt of Arctic sea ice has not been as profound as in the last two years, scientists said as the ice began its annual Autumn recovery.
At its smallest extent this summer, on 12 September, the ice covered 5.10 million sq km (1.97 million sq miles).
This was larger than the minima seen in the last two years, and leaves 2007’s record low of 4.1 million sq km (1.6 million sq miles) intact.
But scientists note the long-term trend is still [...]
Categories: Science & Environment
