They joined forces, got their financing and set off to build a mouse connectome.
Japanese investors buy a vast majority of government bonds, so lawmakers do not have to worry about a Greek-style financing crisis set off by the fears of foreign bondholders.
Every year, when the trustees of Social Security and Medicare publish their report on the programs' finances they set off a round of partisan bickering about the solvency of the twin programs covering pensions and health care for retired Americans.
But refunding it would punch a huge hole in Italy's finances and set off an increase in interest rates for Italian bonds, wiping out all the painful sacrifices last year.
Attempting to restore his reputation (and, presumably, his finances), he set off in 1823 to search for the source of the Nile and died of dysentery in Benin, leaving Sarah, as usual, to cope as best she could.
In this nightmare vision of the future, many prerevolutionary observers predicted that the pressures generated by modern war finance would set off a chain of debt defaults that would either destroy established political orders or cause a sudden lurch into despotic rule.
In fact, more than two years after the revelations that Greece had been fudging its public finance reports set off the crisis, the euro remains above its lifetime average of about $1.21, and is overvalued by more than 5 percent against the dollar, according to The Economist magazine's "Big Mac index".
After raising roughly $30,000 in financing, the four set off for South America in the fall of 2007, and the film's focus gradually crystallized on Oxenham and Boughen.
If governments fail to fix their finances, it could set off defaults that saddle banks with tens of billions of euros in bad debts, triggering a rerun of the 2008 credit crunch and leading to a double-dip recession.
