Banks may be tempted to keep feeding the machine at the expense of laxer lending standards.
Other disability benefits, with even laxer entry conditions than incapacity benefit, remain largely unchanged.
Today they enjoy laxer accounting, loose collateral rules at central banks, explicit debt guarantees and asset-purchasing schemes.
Because of laxer accounting rules, public-sector pension schemes, particularly in America, have not faced the same pressures.
Mr Laxer says his staff are rigorously trained in credit analysis and spend time getting to know their customers.
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Surveys in America and Europe show that banks' lending standards have got laxer as they fall over themselves to lend to companies.
He has managed to instil a discipline that evaded his laxer predecessors, awing the players and the media and banishing the WAGs.
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More respectable offshore centres, such as the Channel Islands, resent being lumped together with laxer places such as Nauru and the Cook Islands.
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And the stuff is also smuggled in from places such as Brazil, where controls are laxer and where endemic leprosy means that thalidomide use is widespread.
The drop in arrests reflects not laxer enforcement, but stronger.
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The affair could scupper the campaign to defang the FCPA. American firms have long grumbled that they are at a competitive disadvantage because other countries' anti-bribery laws are laxer.
Its shunting of capital from the bank to the insurance company is not, both the bank and its regulator, the Federal Banking Commission, insist, designed to take advantage of a laxer insurance regime.
Insurance companies' response to the crisis has been depressing: as well as demanding, reasonably, compensation for their losses on state bonds, they also want laxer capital requirements and an extension of the ban on foreign-controlled insurers.
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