But the testimony of government officials Thursday made clear that even a firm meeting regulatory standards for capital and liquidity can fall prey to a collapse in confidence, making it virtually impossible to raise capital to stop the damage fast enough to matter.
When those upper floors began to fall, they forced everything below them to collapse in a "piledriver" effect.
Lehman then became the first major domino to fall in the economic collapse.
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His own, internally divided, Peronist party supports him mainly out of fear that, were he to fall, it might collapse with him.
In other words, Asian central banks are caught in an awkward dilemma: either they try to break the dollar's fall, or they try to escape from underneath its collapse.
Without those implicit government guarantees, Pangloss values collapse, leading to a general fall in asset prices, which in turn, leads to loan defaults and losses for the banks.
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Spanish banking group Santander has seen profits fall 59% after setting aside money to cover losses from the collapse of Spain's property market.
These changes can be traced to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union, events that forever altered America's role in Europe and the world.
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Whereas in the early 1960s the nation was enjoying a period of historic economic growth, now the nation is only beginning to feel some stability after the financial collapse of the fall of 2008.
Stock markets dutifully took off, only to fall back within days as reality sank in and investors realized the real estate collapse continued unabated, along with the unfolding carnage.
The fall was partly due to the evacuation of a platform in Norwegian waters which is at risk of collapse unless its legs are repaired.
Many readers may not remember the first half of 1998, but may be more likely to recall the Russian ruble crisis in July 1998 and the ensuing collapse in the fall of hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM).
If engineers were held to the same standards, bridges would collapse as often as banks, planes would fall from the sky (if they ever got off the ground), and cyclical blackouts would be a permanent feature of our electrical grid.
Some pundits agonise that profit growth built on the impoverishment of workers at home and the export of jobs abroad as firms outsource operations to China and India cannot be sustained: consumer confidence will fall, demand will plummet and profits will collapse.
Attempts to prevent the fall would, if successful in more than merely smoothing it, simply store up a bigger collapse later.
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