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That led to once-unthinkable proposals such as forcing public employees to cut their retirement benefits or demanding that investors in municipal bonds ― long considered among the safest investments ― take pennies on the dollars they lent to Detroit.

My comments:

To take pennies on the dollars is to get short changed, i.e. forcing one to taking a loss on their investment.

You know what pennies and dollars are, I suppose. Yeah, pennies are the smaller sums. A dollar equals 100 pennies. If you invest a dollar and fail to get 100 pennies back, you suffer a loss, hence the saying. Literally, to take pennies on the dollar is to invest a dollar and only get a few pennies in return.

In our example, investors in Detroit’s municipal bonds face the exact prospect of having to take losses on their investment.

Municipal bonds have long been long considered the safest investments, until now.

In case you missed the news, Detroit, the Motown, is bankrupt.

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Go to Zhang Xin's column

本文僅代表作者本人觀點，與本網立場無關。歡迎大家討論學術問題，尊重他人，禁止人身攻擊和發布一切違反國家現行法律法規的內容。

About the author:

Zhang Xin（張欣） has been with China Daily since 1988, when he graduated from Beijing Foreign Studies University. Write him at: zhangxin@chinadaily.com.cn, or raise a question for potential use in a future column.