Crisis and its contagion are now constrained by current-account surpluses, where once big deficits gaped (see chart 2), and by fat and growing foreign-exchange reserves.

ECONOMIST: This time, emerging markets are for real

Like many Indian companies protected for decades from foreign competition, Tata had gotten to 2000 still fat and slow.

FORBES: The Next People's Car

The fat tax was instead fried by Danish farmers complaining of the high administrative cost of fat-tax compliance, and losing business to foreign competitors who were running away with the bacon and the kringles.

FORBES: Taxes On "Fatty Foods", And Their Unintended Consequences

There is ferment in U.S. academia over whether University Inc. is just one more fat, inefficient, overpriced sector waiting to be plucked by foreign rivals.

FORBES: Magazine Article

Brazil's professional football clubs are in fact departments of social clubs, whose amateur administrators often make a fat illicit living from the transfer fees paid for their stars by foreign clubs.

ECONOMIST: Brazil

But on the basis of the loss of a football team they barely refrained from declaring a mourning period, but, in parallel, the teams which had grown fat on government money rammed through a decision on increasing the number of foreign players, a decision which buries the team once and for all.

FORBES: Putin's Regime is the "Defense of Emptiness"

But competition is growing, and apprehension is rising that University Inc. is just one more fat, inefficient, overpriced U.S. sector waiting to be plucked by foreign rivals.

FORBES: Higher ed is a globalized business

The U.S. is fat and rich, and we can probably survive our sloppiness in domestic affairs, but mistakes in foreign policy are another story entirely.

CENTERFORSECURITYPOLICY: The past, and the present

But a decision by Orascom's construction arm in 2007 to sell some cement plants it had built in northern Algeria to France's Lafarge at a fat profit and without consulting Algeria's government is said to have turned Mr Bouteflika against foreign investors.

ECONOMIST: Why Algeria is still dull and gloomy