This arrangement came crashing down in the fall of 2008 as mortgage defaults increased and the guarantees became real liabilities.

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These real-world impacts will be felt when currently unfunded liabilities need to be paid.

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Just because Washington's Enron-like accounting ignores these liabilities doesn't mean they are any less real politically or economically.

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Third, the very fact that this lawsuit got to be as big as it is underscores a real vulnerability for all companies that have well-defined brand liabilities.

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This is purely nominal rebalancing, but it cuts the real value of government debt by a third, slashes government spending in real terms and balances the budget by inflating income and deflating liabilities and overheads.

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So that's one concern, and another concern is some of them still have pretty tough liabilities on their books because a lot of them lent into commercial real estate or other loans that they're not sure are going to get repaid.

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Since then, demand for bonds has pushed real yields steadily lower, so that even as shares have recovered, stated pension liabilities have increased faster.

ECONOMIST: Company pensions

One part ("the bad bank") will assume all the residential and commercial real-estate loans and securitized mortgages as assets, and all the long-term debt as liabilities.

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