Falling asset prices meant that many banks and firms had debts that outweighed their assets.
Christopher Brown, 55, had debts and said he felt pressured to live beyond his means after his wife discovered he was calling gay chat lines.
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In the CPP survey, about 50% of people said they had debts they feared they would not be able to repay in the coming months, rising to 65% among people aged between 25 and 34.
Yet when it was wound up in October, it had more debts than it started with.
Mr Jolleys, who is known as Henry, told the court he removed his wife's name from their account as she had mounting debts and he did not want her to spend the money.
The fund had suffered huge losses in the subprime mortgage fiasco, and efforts to renegotiate its debts had failed.
This was partly because debts had risen faster than inflation in recent years, he said.
Most of the universities where students had the largest debts were in London.
At first, officials planned not to compensate shareholders, arguing that the size of Railtrack's debts had made its shares all but worthless.
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In the same month Neath Rugby Club escaped a winding-up order after it was accepted it had paid its debts to HMRC.
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Few other countries had the huge debts that made Hungary so wobbly, or the gaping current-account deficit that made Latvia so vulnerable.
Wonga staff had tried to collect some debts by suggesting the defaulting customers had committed fraud and might be reported to the police, it said.
The report said the DfE had struggled to enforce payment of debts as the rules on academy sponsorship had changed.
Farnood insisted that he had already paid his debts, as his properties in Dubai and Kabul were confiscated.
They needed it to pay down the debts that had accumulated, but it wouldn't cover a fraction of them.
Five years ago, both Italy and Sweden had run up similar debts.
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In August 1998, after the Russian government had defaulted on its debts, liquidity suddenly evaporated from many financial markets, causing asset prices to plunge.
Yet thanks to the huge pile of debts they had run up in the era of cheap credit, Japanese companies could not afford to pay more.
The company does not have enough money, or was just about to not have enough money, to pay all of the debts it had or was about to incur.
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If countries around the world had not run up debts to sustain their economies when the crisis hit people would have "lost their jobs, they'd have lost their houses, they would have lost their savings", he said.
He rejected Mr Hollande's proposed stimulus programmes, insisting that France had to cut spending and debts.
The company had already been struggling with debts, racked up after buying brands such as Homepride and Fray Bentos.
Where the 2004 team had clearly run up copious debts with good fortune, this one is decidedly in credit.
Mr Osborne disputed this, saying the UK "had to deal with its debts".
On January 27th, Indonesia finally announced plans to resuscitate its banks, which had become paralysed by bad debts and fleeing depositors.
Other speculators like "Goldfinger" were threatening to sue additional poor countries for billions for debts which they had bought for much lower amounts.
Responding to the news, Mr Grant said he wanted to find out more about planning applications involving Lomond Homes that had led to such high debts.
This history has spawned a deep-seated fear of formal default (though many poor countries have had de facto defaults as their debts have been rescheduled).
"To our mutual horror we gradually realised that the campaign had been been left with heavy debts and new invoices kept appearing unexpectedly, " writes Mr Hain.
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