Even without any portfolio shift, Americans shouldn t expect their recent luck to hold up in the future. If there is a global downturn, any region that is long stocks and short bonds is going to get burned.

Yet, even on the assumption that Putin has no plans to nationalize key natural resource companies, he clearly desires strong state control over these commanding heights of the economy.

Assuming that conceptual issues are solved, there remains the major issue of data availability.

Suppose you are concerned about children in Africa dying from preventable diseases.

Assuming it was roughly the size of my wife's hand, I made some measurements of her thumb, and I scaled them out to the size of the skull.

Even assuming better forecasts, the projection of 124 could be a gross underestimate.

Suppose my children have to pay off the debt to you that I incurred. They will be worse off.

If a country is not slow in paying back its debts and applies those policies considered healthy by the markets, bingo, country risk is low.

But if one really thinks that free lunches exist, there is still no reason to privatize government could get the additional returns by investing in the stock market itself.

Assuming that quadrupling of relative value occurred over a hundred years, the excess return on investment amounts to only 1.5 per year hardly the kind of performance that real estate enthusiasts are expecting.

Now polls show that men tell twice as many lies as women assuming the women they ask told the truth.

After the Bush presidency, that rule no longer holds, if it ever did.

Had she been politically active during the Nazi times, Merkel would have landed in a concentration camp.

If we assume that a causal relationship exists, the European directive seems to be fairly well designed, with one main shortcoming.

By assuming away the damage that highly leveraged megabanks can do, the myth of a good crisis merely makes political pressure on central banks all the more likely.

In the face of these undeniable facts, the path chosen by the IMF and the World Bank was, at best, a mark of their incompetence and, at worst, a deliberate ploy to keep the sub Saharan countries and their populations in bondage.

Let s assume that all this fishing is sustainable, though of course it is not. It would then be reassuring to believe that killing on such a vast scale does not matter, because fish do not feel pain.

And what we do, is we say that the ultimate outcome of a nation is how successful is it at creating happy and healthy lives for its citizens.

If free and fair elections were to be held in any Arab country, Islamists would come to power.

If the student leaders had really wanted to take over the government, and use violence to do so, this theory would be convincing.

If a proverbial Martian were watching the flow of electrons between East Asia and North America, he would probably notice robust two way traffic.

Assuming he conducted them at all, they very probably did not produce the neat results that he used to assail his opponents.

If it is assumed that three quarters of them attend one meeting each year at an average cost of 5,000 per trip, the added cost would be 424,000.

Of course, before being bailed out by governments, banks had never made any return in their history, assuming that their assets are properly marked to market.

If you are a woman watching, you feel in your gut that these women won't be window dressing.

For the sake of argument, even if Musharraf faces impeachment and by some stroke of luck is saved from being thrown out of office, his future will be bleak.

Assuming that the Bush administration is serious in its current efforts, the US must have a Plan B in case the talks fail.

If the child data type were different, it would be in a different table, but there would still be a foreign key referencing the EmpNo column of the employees table.

Still, even assuming that the American public would tolerate such a presence, the Iraqi public would not.

Even if we assumed unreasonably that it caused all deaths from floods, droughts, heat waves, and storms, this total would amount to just 0.06 of all deaths in developing countries.

If you were President Richard Nixon, there was no ignoring what appeared on the front page of The New York Times .

At best, Russia is a potential partner in the effort to manage globalization s challenges at worst, it is a potential problem.

Indeed, even if everyone in the world had participated the requisite hour, the result would have been the equivalent of turning off China s carbon emissions for roughly 45 seconds.

Assuming that current trends in resource availability are maintained, significant additional funding of several billion United States dollars will be needed over the period from 2005 to 2007.

Someone who fell asleep in August 2008 and woke up in 2010 would probably never guess that there had been any interruption whatsoever in China s burgeoning imbalances with the West.

A simple model based on prohibition and testing for gene modification will not be enough, assuming that detection is possible at all.

If we assume that the number of sites is just the whole area of the solid divided into the cross section of the adsorbate molecules, we can easily calculate the surface area of the adsorbent.

If we assume that health is a condition of a progressive and wealthy society, so the health and economic status of an individual and society are mutually dependent.

Assuming a flat rate of national contributions to the federal budget, Greece, for example, would shed 2 3 precious percentage points from its public deficit.

Maybe, if not there and if not then, dominoes are more relevant to foreign and security policy today.

Assuming that Ahmadinejad seeks re election, this line up lacks any candidate with clear appeal to the youth vote.

Were such a market for science to exist, scientists would form enterprises, just like businesses, the best of which would succeed, while others would fail.

Of course, if you assume that vast swaths of the countryside will be covered in wind turbines and solar panels, you will inevitably predict that a large number of construction jobs will be required.

An invasion force, assuming that one could be mustered on short notice, would raise the stakes higher still.

If, say, North Korea is willing to respect international standards of economic behavior, it could be invited to join the International Monetary Fund.