So interest rates, he argues, are the least bad option, despite being a blunt instrument.
But it could very well turn out to be the least bad option we are going to have.
These are times when we might need to choose the least bad option and do something that we otherwise would never do.
Global central bankers have determined that the currency devaluation path is the least bad choice in order to deleverage the unsustainable debts in the system.
"We are voting for the least bad candidate, " said Manuel Palomera, a 34-year-old travel agent who said he was casting his ballot for Vazquez Mota.
It may be the least efficient at everything, but it will still have a comparative advantage in the industry in which it is relatively least bad.
That is still a minority view, but financial markets clearly expect things to get at least bad enough for the Fed to start cutting interest rates soon.
It could indeed default through inflation, could indeed decide to default as the least bad option, but it cannot be forced into a hard default as they can.
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All the same, if the Greek-Cypriots manage to elect the least bad candidate on offer, there is still a flicker of hope that compromise may eventually be reached.
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The Bank of China, the least bad of the country's four big banks, expects that in five years' time consumers will account for half of the bank's loans.
Mr Michnik sees that decision in retrospect as probably the least bad of the available options: it would have done Poland no good, he argues, to repeat the Hungarian uprising of 1956.
So this process means that in some ways the winner will not be the bid that is thought to be the best, but rather the one that is considered least bad by most of the voters.
Paying over the odds for bad loans could be a way quietly to recapitalise the banks, so long as it was accompanied by hard decisions about saving those that are the least bad and closing the worst.
Campaign spending is an imperfect way to inform voters, but just as democracy is the worst political system except for all the others, freedom for everyone to publicly express and promote their views remains the least bad alternative.
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This makes the current recession at least as bad as any since the second world war.
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Yet the Americans and British consider such policies least-bad solutions, to be reversed as soon as possible.
You usually need some good news, which has been hard to come by, or at least no bad news.
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But the divide between this city and the rest of the country is at least as bad -- and it seems to get worse every year.
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The death toll from mistakes is at least as bad as that from car accidents or breast cancer, and maybe as bad as that from strokes.
As it turned out, there was no erring about it at all, as the storm turned out to be at least as bad, probably worse, than expected.
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Mr. WESSEL: There are every signs it's going to be a very deep recession, at least as bad as the one of the early '80s, if not worse.
"We hope forecasts are exaggerating the amount of snow, but you never can tell, " Bloomberg said, adding that at least the bad weather is arriving on a weekend, when the traffic is lighter and snowplows can clean up the streets more easily.
Margins high enough to build muscle in good times, and maintain at least some profitability in bad times.
Part of him must hope that he is at least getting all the bad news over with at once.
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He cited a disagreement with the union over arbitration rules for teachers and his concern that agreements across the state would expire after one year, which he said rendered them essentially toothless because it takes at least two years of bad evaluations before districts can quickly fire a tenured teacher.
Specifically, I had hoped that the anticipated addition of the Fed Funds targets of individual FOMC members which I thought was a bad idea would at least weaken their previous collective commitment to keep that rate at its near-zero level at least until mid-2013 which I also thought was a bad idea.
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Fossil fuels are bad, at least if you subscribe to the global warming theory.
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