And the man who pollsters say would win a general election if one were held today, Silvio Berlusconi, told people to stay away as a mark of protest against the current centre-left government, which had only just been shakily put together after its predecessor collapsed last month.
Under Mayor David Dinkins, he stabilized a department whose morale and effectiveness had collapsed under his predecessor, Lee Brown.
When a predecessor, Edward I. Koch, collapsed at his gym a few years back, he told reporters from his gurney that he was fine.
It began selling a new roadster called the S-V8 in Britain last month, a quarter-century after its predecessor company collapsed in bankruptcy.
The two-point plan echoes Mr. Berlusconi's predecessor, whose government collapsed under the weight of this and other crises.
Like many of his peers, Mr. Bacon — who along with George Soros made a bundle when the euro zone's predecessor, the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, collapsed in 1992 — recognized that the buildup of debts, deficits and competitive imbalances in Europe made some form of crisis inevitable.
The government of his predecessor Saad Hariri collapsed after ministers from the powerful and armed Islamist Shiite group Hezbollah walked out on him for refusing to reject the findings of a special tribunal set up to investigate the murder of his father.
Once Nero had passed, the Empire would last only another 100 years before Marcus Aurelius' son, the "guileless" and ignorant Commodus, would set in motion misrule that would collapse everything his predecessors had worked for.
With polite horror, the couple nod along to stories of their predecessors, former tenants who collapsed from heat exhaustion, were bitten by every kind of snake and spider: "Fanged in the ankle and ass, I shit you not, kids.
Mr. Flowers reaped profits from his investment in Shinsei Bank, whose predecessor, the Long-Term Credit Bank of Japan, collapsed in 1998 under $26.7 billion of bad debt.
