It's like tapered to the downside.

The job, though, came with one small downside. And that is they intended to publish my email address at the end of every column.

So, that's the upside. The circular mill is the downside.

It's the downside correlation of their fortunes that will become more and more possible.

And even a tiny probability of catastrophe is unacceptable when the downside could be of global consequence.

Warren Buffet showed another way, in providing equity to Goldman Sachs. By issuing preferred shares with warrants (options), one reduces the public s downside risk and ensures that they participate in some of the upside potential.

It is a mistake to conflate technocratic elites (those with PhDs or other advanced economics degrees) with other kinds of elites (those with money or power, especially if they inherited one or the other). Most economists understood the downside risks of European monetary union.

SEOUL Emerging economies are facing significant uncertainty and serious downside risks. One major source of instability is the looming reversal of the US Federal Reserve s expansionary monetary policy the prospect of which is generating volatility in global financial markets and threatening to disrupt emerging economy growth.

To the extent that this is true of other advanced economies, the global economy faces an extended multi year period of low growth, with residual downside risk coming from policy gridlock and mistakes in Europe, the US, and elsewhere. That scenario implies slower growth possibly 1 1.5 percentage points slower in developing countries, including China, again with a preponderance of downside risk.

But that approach, too, might have a downside. Consider Spain, where too much fiscal decentralization to regional governments contributed significantly to weakening otherwise strong public finances.

So far, the downside and upside risks for the world economy are balanced. But if sound government policies in advanced and major emerging economies contain the downside risks that are more prevalent in the first half of this year which derive from political and policy uncertainty a more resilient global economic recovery could take hold in the second half of 2011 and into 2012.

It's absolutely phenomenal. The only downside is that it requires you to know how to text send a text message. Nobody over 40 knows how to do that.

Japanese like stagnation in the developed world is challenging externally dependent Asia to shift its focus to internal demand. Downside pressures currently squeezing China and India underscore that challenge.

But the question is, are they so dangerous these risks of doing something about aging that they outweigh the downside of doing the opposite, namely, leaving aging as it is?

One downside of such a prospect that Iran would likely retaliate against US interests and personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan, and, using Hamas and Hezbollah, against Israel and others. Iran could also interfere with oil traffic, leading to a spike in prices and delivering a further blow to American and global economic recovery.

Private borrowers often have to offer collateral, such as their houses. The collateral limits the lenders downside risk, and the fear of losing the pledged assets encourages borrowers to act prudently.

It's a free program you download for your Mac or PC, and you make free phone calls anywhere in the world The downside is that you have to wear a headset like a nerd.

Yes, companies have more hedging tools at their disposal. But the ability to manage downside risk comprehensively is still limited by incomplete longer term markets and public private partnerships that cannot be sufficiently leveraged.

The existing business model allows them to take the upside when they win, and hand over the downside to taxpayers when they lose. This encourages excessive risk and threatens repeated cycles of boom bust bailout.

These investors do not view the 7 annual return on stocks as an average expectation, with downside risks counterbalanced by upside opportunities. Rather, they see a good scenario outcome that only the foolhardy would trust.

And one downside of China s success is that many other countries are finding it much harder to establish more than a niche in manufacturing. As a consequence, developing countries are starting to de industrialize and become more dependent on services at much lower levels of income than has been the pattern for developed countries a phenomenon that I have called premature de industrialization.

On the downside, one of the most important risks is further financial contagion in Europe if the eurozone s problems spread as seems likely to Portugal, Spain, and Belgium. Given the current level of official resources at the disposal of the International Monetary Fund and the European Union, Spain now seems too big to fail yet too big to be bailed out.

But there's also a downside to this a kind of dark side, in fact and that is that the more tightly linked we've become to each other, the harder it is for each of us to remain independent.

While the IMF s primary scenario is that Irish and Portuguese debt levels will soon stop rising, it comes with a chilling litany of downside risks. The likelihood that budget deficit and debt targets will be missed is rising.

New ways to borrow and to spread risk seemed to have little downside. More competition for investment banking oligarchs from commercial bankers and insurance companies with deep pockets seemed likely to reduce the investment banking industry s unconscionable profits.

The attenuation of downside risks and pleasant surprises in developed and emerging economies could lead to a further increase in demand for risky assets (equities and credit), which would reinforce economic recovery via wealth effects and lower borrowing costs.

But the downside of this aspirational language and philosophy can be a perpetual, personal restlessness. Many men and women in the rest of the world especially in the developing world observe this in us and are ambivalent about it.

One of the few positive consequences of the 2008 financial crisis was the elevation of the G 20's global role in principle, it is a far more representative forum for international leadership than the G 7 ever was. There is, however, a downside to the G 20's emergence the large number of participants can make it difficult to reach agreements and get things done.

BERKELEY The United States continues to recover from its deepest economic slump since the Great Depression, but the pace of recovery remains frustratingly slow. There are several reasons to anticipate modest improvement in 2013, although, as usual, there are downside risks.

And when the downside risks materialized, the losses were largely socialized the primary reason why US public debt has soared in recent years. Asking shareholders and management to pay a relatively small amount is entirely fair and appropriate under these circumstances.

More broadly, we have lost sight of what banking is supposed to do. Banks play an essential role in all modern economies, but that role is not to assume a huge amount of risk, with the downside losses covered by society.

NEW YORK The Ebola crisis reminds us, once again, of the downside of globalization. Not only good things like principles of social justice and gender equality cross borders more easily than ever before so do malign influences like environmental problems and disease.

If the company cannot make its interest payments, its assets will need to be sold or its activities otherwise scaled back. But, in contrast to the case of the struggling homeowner, not much of those downside costs typically fall on the general partner.

Asians need not be pessimistic the perfect storm of a hard landing in China, a double dip recession in the United States, and a collapse of the eurozone is unlikely. But they cannot rule out the downside risk of a synchronized global downturn.

Similarly, a potential downside to quantitative easing is that low interest rates send capital to higher growth, high interest rate countries. In theory, as capital floods in, these countries exchange rates will appreciate rapidly, making them look unattractive and automatically stemming the flow.

Bankers want to be so highly leveraged for a simple reason implicit government guarantees mean that they get the upside when things go well, while the downside is someone else s problem. Contrary to bankers claims, this is not a good arrangement for society.

The third group, led by Europe, will struggle, as continued economic stagnation fuels social and political disenchantment in some countries and complicates regional policy decisions. Anemic growth, deflationary forces, and pockets of excessive indebtedness will hamper investment, tilting the balance of risk to the downside.

This is a relatively modest prediction. Without automatic stabilizers or a strong financial stability framework underpinned by deposit insurance, coping with the downside risks of the potentially destabilizing financial reforms that the government is pursuing will be difficult enough a credit shock could prove disastrous.

In the jargon of economics, this is moral hazard. But no special training is needed to know that it is unwise and dangerous when bank executives get the upside (huge bonuses) when things go well and everyone else bears the downside risks (bailouts and recession).

Of course, numerous downside risks adverse weather shocks, military conflict, and political turmoil still can undermine the hard earned benefits of this social and economic record. But it is the dichotomized nature of their economies and finances that represents Africa s most intractable structural imbalance.

Global warming is a case in point. When the downside risks associated with such limits and thresholds are brought into estimates of sustainable development, the growth in wealth among the world s wealthy nations will probably turn out to have been less than we now think.

But I am afraid that the risks are more on the downside. Indeed, 2012 could prove to be the year in which the experiment with the euro, the culmination of a 50 year process of economic and political integration in Europe, comes to an end.

On the downside, confidence among consumers and investors alike has taken a hit, mainly owing to fears about radiation leakages and power shortages. According to the Japan Center for Economic Research, power supply disruptions could negatively affect the Japanese economy for the next three years.

Was I willing to take on three years of aggressive treatment and potential long term side effects for a 10 point increase in my chances of being alive and cancer free for five years, especially since no one really knows what the chances of recurrence in 10 or 20 years are? Meanwhile, five years from now there may be new drugs that are more effective and less toxic, mitigating the downside of a later recurrence.

As for the current financial situation in Hong Kong, Chen Delin said that the uncertainty of the economic and asset markets increased and downside risks increased, but the financial system Hong Kong was robust, so that good defence were made and the earthquake resistant capacity was abundant.