However, countries that saw big increases in house prices in the late 1980s later saw a big collapse.
The most seismic event of the crisis to date, the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers last September, demonstrated the costs of letting a big financial institution collapse.
Seventy percent overall and 75% of independents agreed that banks should not be allowed to be so big that their collapse threatens the rest of financial sector.
He - if there was a crisis, like the Big Dig tunnel collapse, he took charge and understood all the intricacies of engineering and - better than probably a lot of engineering experts on it.
Now there is growing concern that a really big storm might collapse much of the global electric grid, particularly in places with long high-voltage transmission lines such as Australia, Canada, China and the United States.
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At the moment astrophysicists are trying to figure out whether the universe will collapse in a big crunch, expand at just the right rate to avoid collapse, or expand very rapidly.
Where do these numbers come from, three million jobs lost, if all the big three automakers should collapse?
Besides soft commodity prices, there was also tumult from the collapse of big trading firm MF Global.
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In September, the Federal Reserve co-ordinated a rescue of Long-Term Capital Management, a big hedge fund facing collapse.
The deal's collapse is a big setback for Germany's financial industry, in which there has been little meaningful consolidation.
The collapse of a big car company would provide a huge test.
The plunging euro at mid-week also did not help, as reports circulated that hedge funds were making big bets on a Euro collapse.
Two major shocks then aggravated that fiscal restraint: the Asian financial crisis, which pummelled exports, and the collapse of several big financial institutions.
In April 1991, when questions about Mutual Benefit first surfaced, the insurance industry was reeling from the collapse of another big company, Executive Life.
Fraud was a material part of the mortgage collapse, a big factor in commercial property and loan losses and a component in investment banking and private-equity losses that did more damage than acknowledged.
The good news is that if we get through 2012 without the financial collapse of a big bank or a eurozone government, our economy will probably muddle through, flatlining rather than falling back into acute recession.
And, of course, because of the interconnected nature of the banking systems - with banks lending to each other - the collapse of a big bank in that way would wreak significant harm on contiguous banks.
The collapse occurred at the Big Gossan underground mine, about a kilometer away from Grasberg.
Our big concern is that investment will collapse again as a result of what he's done.
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And third, history suggests that big current-account deficits always collapse in the end.
The 2010 mine explosion and collapse at the Upper Big Branch Mine in West Virginia that killed 29 miners played a role in the slowdown.
Most of this debate misses the point: that the country was gripped by an obsession with home ownership that had a big hand in fueling the housing collapse.
Frankly, just as I favor strict term limits as a way to cleanse our political system of incompetents, I welcome the call for accountability when too-big-to-fail institutions collapse because reasonable investments utilizing reasonable risk parameters were not undertaken.
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New York's mayor, Michael Bloomberg, a liberal Republican, pointed out last week at a Senate town-hall hearing in Philadelphia that the Big Apple's economy would collapse without the half-million or so undocumented people among the city's 3m immigrants.
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The suddenness of Enron's collapse raises the possibility of big, as yet unreported, problems inside the firm.
Ultimately deeply undermines public trust in the capital markets and really threatened the collapse of almost all the big financial institutions.
But the collapse of Mycal, a big employer with once-powerful friends, is a sign that the system is under awful stress.
These companies are suffering big losses from a solar panel price collapse due to a glut of government-subsidized competitors and from slumping global sales, especially in debt-crippled Europe.
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The Federal Reserve Bank of New York is helping to create a central counterparty for CDS trades, which should prevent the kind of disruption created by the collapse of Lehman, a big CDS dealer.
All faced not only the collapse of banks that were too big to be allowed to fail, but also the frightening prospect of trying to prop up banks that might have proved (and in Ireland's case were) too big to save.
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