Their stand-alone ratings, which assume implicit government support, are now below investment grade.
"The reference to 30 years is based on projections which assume no change," he told The Guardian.
Public health teams which assume little will change for the first few months are likely to be disabused of that notion pretty rapidly.
Arrangements which assume that families are still comprised of one bread winner and one homemaker; mum in the kitchen; dad in the office.
Contrast this moment of intellectual evasion with Stoppard's Arcadia or Frayn's Copenhagen, which assume audiences are capable of absorbing, if not always understanding, crucial scientific details.
And where the judge is not a specialist, counsel have to make submissions as to the law which assume no knowledge on the part of the judge".
Some economists are more sanguine, arguing that people will adapt and work longer, rendering moot measures of dependency which assume no one works after the age of 65.
Unlike other mammals, howler monkeys for example, which assume similar positions on trees and live in the same habitat, sloths eat little and have incredibly low energy levels.
These kinds of firm-specific shocks are typically excluded from economists' models, which assume that individual businesses' ups and downs tend to cancel each other out.
If governments do not act to constrain carbon emissions, the current business initiatives, which assume such constraints in the future, will eventually wither.
Right now, the patchwork of regulations — which assume a great deal of self-policing — suits the factory-farm industry all too well.
