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 up more than 40% from its lows, and the ailing automotive industry has registered a couple of months of healthy growth. But while talk of economic recovery fills the air, there’s quiet acknowledgment that the economy is still on life support. Without hundreds of billions of dollars in government assistance, we don’t know quite where the economy would be, but we do know it would be worse. Even with it, economists are talking not about a V-shaped recovery but of possibly a double-dip, the dreaded W.

Did all this have to happen? The consumer excesses were building for years, and the structural flaws in our financial system — as President Obama emphasized in his Monday, Sept. 14, address to Wall Street — were a slow build as well. But it is also clear that the mad scramble for safety among financial institutions, which sent bond-market spreads out of sight and shut down access to credit for virtually everyone, began in earnest the day Lehman went down.

In the year since, institutions have changed — some grown larger, others gone — as have the people who lead them. Here’s a gallery of major players in the financial crisis — how they got into trouble, and where they are now.

Read “After the Financial Crisis, a Cleanup That Changes Everything.”

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, effort by governments on both sides of the Atlantic to patch things up.

You already knew all this, of course. It happened just last year, and in recent days the news media have engaged in an orgy of commemoration and explanation of the Lehman collapse and its aftermath. So here’s the $64 trillion question: What, if anything, have we learned from the experience? (See the top 10 financial collapses of 2008.)

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 was “a satisfaction.” (Read “Obama Shelves U.S. Missile Shield: The Winners and Losers”)

And most people in the Czech Republic agree with him. Repeated polls have found that more than 60% of the country opposes the construction of radar facilities within its borders. Many feared that the U.S. missile defense system would destabilize security by provoking Russia, which has long been against the building of the shield, and making the Czech Republic a target for an Iranian first strike. “Seventy percent of people in the Czech Republic will certainly welcome [this decision],”said Social Democratic leader Jiri Paroubek, whose party had opposed the radar, citing recent polls. “I think it will raise the United States’ prestige.”

But not every Czech feels this way. Proponents of the radar — mostly conservative politicians from the former center-right government that recently lost power — are openly angry with the decision, and are concerned that the U.S. has acquiesced to Russia’s demands that the system be scrapped. Ex-premier Mirek Toplanek, whose government fell in March, said the decision showed that the U.S. no longer cares about the security of Central Europe. While in power, Toplanek had supported the system against public opinion because he felt the presence of U.S. military technology was a physical manifestation of the determination that Central Europe would never return to Russia’s sphere of influence.

Jan Vidim, head of the lower house defense committee and a lawmaker for Topolanek’s Civic Democrats, said the removal of the defense system was a blow to Czech interests. “The first feeling is a great disappointment and disgust over Mr. Obama’s cowardice,” Vidim said, according to the website of the daily Lidove Noviny. “He performs endless concessions, for example towards Russia. I consider it a betrayal of allies.” (Read “Joe Klein on the Scrapping of Anti-Missile Defenses”)

Elsewhere in Europe, the reaction to the announcement was mixed:

Poland
In Warsaw, where on Thursday Poles marked the 70th anniversary of the Soviet Union’s invasion of the country, Prime Minister Donald Tusk told the Associated Press that Obama had assured him in a phone call that plans to alter the missile defense project will not hurt Poland’s security. But some were skeptical. “It’s not good,” former Polish president and Solidarity leader Lech Walesa told the AP. “I can see what kind of policy the Obama Administration is pursuing towards this part of Europe. The way we are being approached needs to change.” Aleksander Szczyglo, head of Poland’s National Security Office, characterized the change as a “defeat primarily of American long-distance thinking about the situation in this part of Europe.”

Russia
The Kremlin did not immediately give an official reaction, but, not surprisingly, senior Russian officials expressed support for the move. “It’s like having a decomposing corpse in your flat and then the undertaker comes and takes it away,”said Dmitry Rogozin, Russia’s ambassador to NATO, according to the BBC. “This means we’re getting rid of one of those niggling problems which prevented us from doing the real work.”

NATO
In Brussels, NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen welcomed the U.S. decision, a sentiment echoed by a statement released by Britain’s Foreign Office, which said that the announcement “confirms the close cooperation between the U.S. and NATO allies on developing anti-missile systems.” Rasmussen also said that missile defense would continue in an altered form. “It is my clear impression that the American plan on missile defense will involve NATO … to a higher degree in the future,” the AP reported him as saying. “This is a positive step in the direction of an inclusive and transparent process, which I also think is in the interest of … the NATO alliance.”

Read “Obama’s Tough Choice on Iran”

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 ads for the first half of the 10-year deal that is expected to be completed early next year.

Yahoo and Microsoft said earlier in their announcement that the agreement will provide more choices for consumers and advertisers but they expect it will be “closely reviewed by the industry and government regulators.”

Silicon Valley / San Jose Business Journal

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 and running MMORPGs, few have experience with anything as “large-scale” as World of Warcraft and its 11-million-strong subscriber base.

The biggest recurring theme of the at-times-technical presentation was “large-scale.” Brack began by explaining the studio’s layout, emphasizing that Blizzard tries to form its structure around the people, and not the other way around.

The programming team is responsible for updating and maintaining 5.5 million lines of code. The team of 51 artists has created 1.5 million unique assets for the game, with a handful of sub-teams dedicated to weapons and armor; environments; animation; props like torches or fence posts; dungeons and large objects like houses; and technical art to polish what everyone else creates. There are 37 designers responsible for creating classes, professions, events, a library of more than 70,000 spells, and a population of nearly 40,000 non-player characters.

Then there’s an entire cinematics department of 123 people that does more than just cutscenes. Pearce said the team acts as reference when merchandising partners want to make replicas, or, say, gaudy 12-foot-tall statues like the one sitting outside Blizzard’s headquarters.

There’s also a QA testing team, which employs 218 people. That group’s job gets tougher as time goes on, Brack said, because the amount of content in the game expands, but the size of the team does not. The original World of Warcraft contained 2,600 quests, with the Burning Crusade expansion adding another 2,700, and Wrath of the Lich King contributing another 2,350 to the game–a total of 7,650 in all. Also adding to the QA team’s woes, Brack said, is that Blizzard promotes from within, taking some of the most talented QA testers out of the pool to work on other parts of the game.

As if there weren’t enough to deal with, Pearce said Blizzard handles the localization of the game in-house. It’s crucial for the game, since World of Warcraft is played in English by fewer than half the game’s players. He added that the team doesn’t do any partial localizations, and adding another language to the game is a commitment to provide ongoing support to that for as long as the game is running.

Patching is another problem, with many different versions of the game and previous patches out there for which compatibility must be assured. Brack said every time the company releases a patch, it needs to prepare more than 120 versions of it to make sure every player will get one compatible with his or her game.

Pearce talked about Blizzard Online Network Services, a group of 68 people who run data centers where servers are hosted in Washington, California, Texas, Massachusetts, France, Germany, Sweden, South Korea, China, and Taiwan. Between them, there are 13,250 server blades and 75,000 CPU cores keeping the World of Warcraft up and running.

Then there are international offices, which employ about 1,700 people across France, South Korea, Taiwan, China, and Ireland dealing with local concerns and customer service. Customer service is one of the biggest chunks of Blizzard, Brack said, with more than 2,500 people worldwide dedicated to the team.

The numbers don’t stop: nearly 150 people on the team are responsible for Battle.net, from maintaining billing and the account system to creating the infrastructure that will let the 12 million active Battle.net players keep persistent friends lists across games when Starcraft II launches. There are also dedicated groups for public relations; a Web team for the game’s slate of official Web sites; the community team serving as forum mods and liaison between developers and players; and a corporate applications team responsible for fraud detection and data mining on the World of Warcraft achievement system. Pearce dropped a little bit of info on that, noting that to date, World of Warcraft players have earned collectively about 4.5 billion achievements.

It’s not over yet. Pearce talked about the eSports team, which has been involved in more than 1,600 tournaments around the world. They also act as a direct line of communication for feedback between the developers and the highest end of high-end players. Blizzard also needs an events team to put together BlizzCon, which Brack said is operated at a substantial loss for the company. While the company doesn’t turn a profit on the annual shindig, Brack said the cost is worth it for marketing purposes.

Speaking of marketing, there’s a World of Warcraft-specific team for that as well. They’re responsible for TV commercials, promotions, and tie-ins like this summer’s World of Warcraft-themed flavors of Mountain Dew. A separate licensing department handles board games, plushies, statues, novels, and anything else with the World of Warcraft logo on it.

World of Warcraft didn’t start off this large, which means Blizzard has needed to establish a recruiting team as well. Blizzard is essentially always hiring, Brack and Pearce said, with 221 job openings worldwide at the moment.

There’s a creative development team responsible for chronicling the lore of the series, working with licensing and novelists to ensure the World of Warcraft story is consistent across products. They don’t create the lore, Brack said, but they do maintain it.

Wrapping up the presentation, the pair also gave quick shouts to their human resources, finance, facilities, legal, and information technology teams. In all, Blizzard has more than 4,000 employees and 600 licensed partners helping to keep the World of Warcraft turning.

Quote: “The moral of the story is that operating an online game is about more than just game development.”–Frank Pearce

Takeaway: Clearly, running a massively multiplayer online game is a massive task indeed. As Pearce noted partway through the hour-long presentation, despite all the numbers thrown at the audience, the most mind-boggling may have been “one,” the number of MMO games Blizzard is making in addition to World of Warcraft.

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 downwards.

They note that at this year’s minimum, the ice covered 24% less ocean than for the 1979-2000 average.

The analysis is compiled from satellite readings at the US National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) in Boulder, Colorado.

Colder front

Among the reasons for the less drastic melt are that Arctic temperatures have been cooler this year than last, researchers said, and that winds have helped disperse sea ice across the region.

NSIDC scientist Walt Meier said the reasons for the somewhat cooler temperatures this year were not entirely clear yet.

“We had cloudier conditions and low pressure zones in late summer that probably helped keep temperatures down,” he told BBC News.

“It’s something we need to look at in more detail.

“But it certainly wasn’t as warm as 2007, which was in the order of 2-3C warmer than the average in a lot of places.”

The question now, he said, was whether 2007 turns out to be a “high-melt blip”, or whether 2009 turns out to be a “low-melt blip” – which will not become evident until next summer at the earliest.

What continues to have scientists worried is that a significant proportion of the cover consists of young, thin ice formed in a single winter.

This is much more prone to melting than the older, thicker ice that dominated in years gone by.

“If we get another warm year, anything like 2007, then the ice is really going to go,” said Dr Meier.

“And the chances are that at some point in the next few years we are going to get a warm one.”

White heat

In recent decades, the Arctic region has been warming about twice as fast as the average for the Earth’s surface.

Recently, scientists specialising in reconstructing past temperatures released data showing that the current decade is the warmest in the Arctic for at least 2,000 years.

Melting ice is a “positive feedback” mechanism driving temperature rise faster. Whereas white ice reflects sunlight back into space, dark water absorbs it, leading to faster warming.

The NSIDC team cautions that this is a preliminary analysis and that further melt is possible, though unlikely, this year.

Next month they will publish a full analysis including more details of how temperatures, currents and winds affected the sea ice this summer.

Adi and Rudolf Dassler started making sports shoes together in their mother’s wash-room in the 1920s.

They fell out during World War II, probably over political differences, and founded firms on either side of a river in southern Germany.

On Monday 21 September, employees of both companies will shake hands and then play a football match.

It is a big deal in the cobblestoned Bavarian town of Herzogenaurach, where two of the world’s largest sportswear companies are based.

First joint activities

When the brothers set up their separate companies in 1948 the town was also split, with residents loyal to one or other of the only major employers.

In a joint release, the two companies said they were making up to support the Peace One Day organisation, which has its annual non-violence day on Monday.

They say that the events will be the first joint activities held by the two companies since the brothers left their shared firm in 1948.

Neither group is now controlled by the descendants of its founding families, although Rudolf’s grandson Frank Dassler raised some eyebrows in the town by working for both Puma and Adidas.

Since 2007, Puma has been majority-owned by PPR, the French luxury goods maker that also owns Gucci.

Adidas Group is much more widely-owned, with no individual shareholder having more than 5%.