The great market upheaval of 2008 has stripped 45 percent from the value of global equities, led bank lending to nearly dry up and caused commodity prices to crash from stratospheric heights

it is helping to lift the long-suffering dollar

As stock markets sank again Wednesday, the dollar rose against its European counterparts, with the British pound falling to $1.6242, a five-year low, and the euro falling to $1.2843, near a two-year low. Only the yen, on a tear of its own, has been stronger

suing the New York-based company for fraud and misrepresentation of sales tied to high-risk mortgage backed securities

Citigroup represented the FLNs as safe, conservative investments. In reality, however, the products were neither. Returns on the notes were linked to the U.S. housing market

The lawsuit also contends Citigroup’s marketing materials contained misleading statistics

inept government policy, not Wall Street greed, that allowed the financial system to spin out of control

government has put in place a system in which it is easy to gamble with other people’s money — particularly borrowed money — by making sure that almost everybody who makes bad loans gets their money back

If Fannie’s and Freddie’s bonds reflected their true risk, they would never have been bought up by the Chinese government or small investors, Mr. Roberts contends, adding that the government just made things worse when it moved in to secure the two mortgage giants in the fall of 2008.

of AAA-rated subprime-mortgage-backed securities issued in 2006, 93 percent — 93 percent! — have now been downgraded to junk status

Conflicts of interest were largely responsible for the disastrous performance of credit rating agencies in assessing the risks of mortgage-backed securities