title: Bowl game

text: Prior to 1992 most bowls had strict agreements with certain conferences. For example, the Rose Bowl traditionally invited the champions of the Pac-10 and the Big Ten conferences. The Sugar Bowl invited the SEC champion and the Orange Bowl hosted the Big 8 conference champion. These conference tie-ins led to situations where the top-ranked teams in the country could not play each other in a bowl game. The national championship was decided after the bowls, solely by voters for various media polls, who tried to decide which team was best, sometimes based on wins against far inferior teams. As a result, there could be multiple championship titles and no single champion. This led to the term "Mythical National Championship", which is still used to describe high school national champions, since high school sports have state championship tournaments but not national.


title: Bowl game

text: Because of the vested economic interests entrenched in the various bowl games, the longer regular season compared to lower divisions of college football, and a desire not to have college players play several rounds of playoff games during final exams and winter recess, the Division I Bowl Subdivision long avoided instituting a playoff tournament to determine an annual national champion. Instead, the National Champion in the Football Bowl Subdivision has traditionally been determined by a vote of sports writers and other non-players.


title: Bowl game

text: In 1995, the Bowl Alliance, formed by the major bowls and conferences, put in place a system where the two highest ranked teams would play each other, even if they were each affiliated with a different bowl. However, the Pac-10 and Big Ten and the Rose Bowl did not participate. Number 1 vs Number 2 bowl match-ups became far more likely, but were not guaranteed. After the 1997 season, undefeated Michigan was ranked first in both major polls, but as the Big Ten champion, they played eighth-ranked Pac-10 champion Washington State in the Rose Bowl. The top Bowl Alliance team, #2 and unbeaten Nebraska, faced one-loss, third-ranked Tennessee in the Orange Bowl. Michigan won by five on New Year's Day and the next night, Nebraska beat Tennessee (playing with an injury-hobbled Peyton Manning) by 25. The AP kept Michigan as the champion, but the Coaches' Poll jumped Nebraska, playing its final game for retiring coach Tom Osborne, in part because of their more lopsided victory against a more highly ranked opponent.


title: Bowl game

text: The following season, the Rose Bowl, Pac-10, and Big Ten joined the other bowls and major conferences to form the Bowl Championship Series. The BCS attempted to match the two highest ranked teams in the country based upon calculations from various sources, including statistics and coaches' polls, with one of the four bowl games in the consortium (the Rose Bowl, Fiesta Bowl, Sugar Bowl, and Orange Bowl) rotating the role of "national championship", or beginning in 2006, a dedicated BCS Championship Game rotated among the BCS venues. The BCS Championship Game, while separate from the four main bowls, was still rotated among their sites. The Coaches Poll was contractually obligated to recognize the winner of the game as its national champion. However, other polls such as the AP Poll may deviate and pick a different team, particularly in years when multiple teams were equally worthy of reaching the game. For example, in 2003, one-loss LSU won the BCS National Championship over Oklahoma, but the AP crowned one-loss USC champion after its Rose Bowl win.


title: Bowl game

text: For the 2014-15 season, the BCS was replaced by a new consortium, the College Football Playoff (CFP). The new system uses a four-team single-elimination tournament, with its participants selected and seeded by a committee; the semi-final games are rotated between pairs of the six member bowls yearly (Rose Bowl and Sugar Bowl, then Orange Bowl and Cotton Bowl Classic, and then the Fiesta Bowl and Peach Bowl). The winners from the two semi-final bowls advance to the College Football Playoff National Championship, which is played at a neutral site determined using bids. Members of the "New Year's Six" that are not hosting semi-final games revert to their traditional tie-ins. Like its predecessors, and in contrast to the officially sanctioned NCAA tournaments at lower levels, the College Football Playoff is not officially recognized as an NCAA championship.


title: Bowl game

text: The National Football League also used the name "bowl" for some of its playoff games. While the NFL Championship was not named a Bowl initially, the league instituted the Pro Bowl as the name of its all-star game in 1951, and introduced the Bert Bell Benefit Bowl (also known as the Playoff Bowl) as a matchup of the two second-place teams in each division from 1960 to 1969.


title: Bowl game

text: When the professional football AFL-NFL merger occurred in 1970, the AFL-NFL World Championship Game became the NFL's championship and is now known as the Super Bowl, as it has been named since 1968 (the name was coined by Lamar Hunt after watching his daughter play with a super ball). There has also been the American Bowl, a preseason match held overseas, and various one-time games informally nicknamed bowls, such as the Bounty Bowl, Ice Bowl, Snow Bowl, Freezer Bowl, Fog Bowl, Mud Bowl, Tuna Bowl, Manning Bowl, Harbaugh Bowl and the proposed (but ultimately canceled) China Bowl.


title: Bowl game

text: As a result, other professional football leagues used or use the name Bowl for their championships, such as the World Football League (World Bowl), NFL Europe (World Bowl), Arena Football League (ArenaBowl), Indoor Football League (United Bowl), Great Lakes Indoor Football League (Great Lakes Bowl) and American Indoor Football Association (AIFA Championship Bowl). The Canadian Football League nicknames one of their rivalries as the Banjo Bowl and another QEW Bowl (also known as the Battle of Ontario); like most Canadian sports leagues, however, the CFL's championship is instead known as a cup (in the CFL's case, the Grey Cup).


title: Bowl game

text: At the NCAA top level of football, the Division I Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS, previously known as Division I-A from 1978 through 2005), teams must earn the right to be bowl eligible, generally by winning at least six games and by not having a losing record at the end of their regular season schedule. They can then be invited to a bowl game based on their finishing placement in their conference, and tie-ins that their conference has to various bowl games. Alternately, a bowl-eligible team may receive an at-large invitation to a bowl game, independent of conference tie-ins.


title: Bowl game

text: Bowls are popular among coaching staffs because the NCAA allows college teams going to bowl games extra weeks of practice they would otherwise not have, and bowl games pay the teams for their participation. Teams belonging to a conference split the money with their conference mates. For the 2010 season, 70 of the 120 Division I FBS teams played in a bowl game.


title: Bowl game

text: An association of the bowl games themselves, independent of the NCAA, has existed since at least 1989. Originally known as the Football Bowl Association, the organization announced a rebranding as "Bowl Season" in October 2020. It aims to work "with all existing bowls to promote the benefits of the entire bowl system".


title: Bowl game

text: NCAA bowl season generally lasts from mid-December to early January with the first week of bowl games usually featuring teams from the Group of Five conferences (American Athletic Conference, Conference-USA, Mid-American Conference, Mountain West Conference, Sun Belt Conference and FBS Independents with the exception of Notre Dame) with bowl games featuring mainly teams from the Power Five conferences (ACC, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-12, SEC and FBS Independent Notre Dame) coming in the second week.


title: Bowl game

text: At lower levels, teams play in playoff tournaments with a national championship game at a neutral site, making invitational bowl games less popular than in the Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS).


title: Bowl game

text: The Division I Football Championship Subdivision (FCS) features only one bowl game, the Celebration Bowl (formerly the Heritage Bowl). It invites the top teams from historically black colleges and universities, one from the SWAC and one from the MEAC. (The SWAC has historically had a longer regular season that extends past Thanksgiving weekend, preventing its teams from participating in the FCS tournament and more closely mirroring the FBS.)


title: Bowl game

text: At the Division II level there are currently four post-season bowls for teams that did not qualify for the DII playoffs: the Mineral Water Bowl, Live United Texarkana Bowl, Corsicana Bowl and the C.H.A.M.P.S. Heart of Texas Bowl (the last of which is a name used by two separate bowls, one for Division II and one for junior colleges). All four of the Division II bowls are played on the same day, the first Saturday of December.


title: Bowl game

text: At the Division III level, all bowls that are currently played are recent developments (starting in 2008 or later). For the 2017 season, 10 bowls are scheduled to be played by teams that did not qualify for the DIII playoffs: a six-bowl series organized for ECAC teams, a two-bowl series organized between the Centennial Conference and MAC, the New York State Bowl (between Liberty League and Empire 8), and the New England Bowl (between the ECFC, MSCAC, CCC and NEWMAC). Prior to 2008, the ECAC also held the ECAC Bowl (1989–2003) for Division I-AA and the North Atlantic Bowl (2007), the last of which is now integrated into the conference's six-bowl series. Additionally, the Division III championship game has historically been known as the Amos Alonzo Stagg Bowl.


title: Bowl game

text: Outside the NCAA, the Victory Bowl is sponsored by the NCCAA, a group that does not restrict its membership to either NCAA or NAIA. The NAIA does not have any invitational postseason bowl games. Starting with the now defunct Wheat Bowl, the NAIA found it easier to schedule bowl games early in the season rather than late—this allowed the schedule to accommodate large college bowl games and high school sports; one such extant example is the College Fanz First Down Classic, a pre-season bowl game for NAIA teams.


title: Bowl game

text: Following traditional bowl games, a series of all-star bowl games round out the post-season schedule. These games seek to showcase the best departing college players, just as the NFL showcases its all-stars in the annual post-season Pro Bowl. Such college all-star games include the East–West Shrine Bowl, the Senior Bowl, the Hula Bowl, and the NFLPA Collegiate Bowl.


title: Bowl game

text: There have also been pre-season and regular-season games carrying the "bowl" moniker, including the Mirage Bowl and the Glasnost Bowl.


title: Bowl game

text: Recently, the term "bowl" has been added to other games that have some special note or sub-plot to the actual game, in college or the National Football League. An example of this is the Bowden Bowl given to games where Florida State and Clemson were coached by the father-son duo of Bobby Bowden, and Tommy Bowden respectively.


title: Bowl game

text: Any games between two very poor teams and/or of a very poor standard of play have been jokingly referred to as a Toilet Bowl.


title: Bowl game

text: In the European Football League (EFL), a European Cup style tournament for European American Football teams affiliated to EFAF (European Federation of American Football), the final game of the EFL is called the Eurobowl, and has been held annually since 1986.


title: Bowl game

text: In Denmark, the national championship game is called Mermaid Bowl, named after the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale.


title: Bowl game

text: In Finland, the national championship game is called Vaahteramalja ("Maple Bowl") and was first held in 1980.


title: Bowl game

text: In Germany, the national championship game in American football is called the German Bowl and was first held in 1979. Apart from the German Bowl, a Junior Bowl has also been contested in Germany since 1982 and a Ladies Bowl was introduced in 1990. Other, related, national championship games in Germany include the German Flag Bowl (est. 2000), German Junior Flag Bowl (1999) and a German Indoor Flag Bowl (2000).


title: Bowl game

text: The annual championship game of the British American Football Association National Leagues is known as the Britbowl.


title: Bowl game

text: The championship game of the American Football Ireland Premier Division is called the Shamrock Bowl. It is generally held around July or August each year and has been played every year since 1986 except for 2000 & 2020.


title: Bowl game

text: The winner of the Israeli Football League is determined every year in the Israel Bowl. The first to lift the Becker Trophy was the Jerusalem Lions in 2008.


title: Bowl game

text: The championship game between the East Japan and West Japan champions in college football, is known as the Koshien Bowl. The top middle school teams also compete in the Koshien Bowl. While the pro football championship is known as the Japan X Bowl. The winners of the Koshien and Japan X bowls play each other for the Japan National Championship in the Rice Bowl. The annual high school football championship game is the Christmas Bowl.


title: Bowl game

text: The championship game of the Dutch AFBN First (or Premier) Division is called the Tulip Bowl. The first edition was held in 1986.


title: Bowl game

text: The championship game of the Swiss Nationalliga A is called the Swiss Bowl. It was first held in 1986.


title: The Silver Skates (film)

text: The Silver Skates (), aka City of Ice (Portugese: "Cidade de Gelo") is a 2020 Russian epic period romantic adventure film directed by Michael Lockshin in his feature directorial debut, with a screenplay written by Roman Kantor, and produced by Petr Anurov. The film is based on the American novel "Hans Brinker, or The Silver Skates" by Mary Mapes Dodge.


title: The Silver Skates (film)

text: The story is set in the late 19th century in Saint Petersburg, capital of the Russian Empire. The city's ice-covered rivers and canals act as broad avenues, traversed on ice-skates and sleds, with markets and winter festivals on the ice. Social classes mix in this winter wonderland, and the courier Matvey crosses paths with the aristocrat Alisa is an intellectual girl, close to a noble family.


title: The Silver Skates (film)

text: The film stars Fedor Fedotov and Sofya Priss, alongside Kirill Zaytsev, Yuri Borisov, Aleksei Guskov, Severija Janusauskaite, Yuri Kolokolnikov, Timofey Tribuntsev, and Alexandra Revenko in supporting roles.


title: The Silver Skates (film)

text: "The Silver Skates" was chosen as the opening film of the 42nd Moscow International Film Festival, where it premiered on October 1, 2020. A limited theatrical release (due to the covid pandemic) was scheduled for December 10, 2020. The film was also shown in IMAX cinemas.


title: The Silver Skates (film)

text: The film collected more than 100 million rubles for the highest-grossing opening weekend of its film screening and brought the total amount of 490.1 million rubles to the show times, despite the covid epidemic quarantine in Russia, compared to a production budget of 500 million rubles.


title: The Silver Skates (film)

text: The rights to the film were acquired by Netflix on June 16, 2021. "The Silver Skates" is the first Russian film to be released on the platform in the Netflix Originals category.


title: The Silver Skates (film)

text: On Christmas Eve, 1899, Imperial Saint Petersburg's frozen rivers and canals transform the capital city into a fairytale-like wonderland, with bustling festivities on the ice.


title: The Silver Skates (film)

text: Pure-hearted 18-year-old Matvey Polyakov is an ice-skating courier of a local bakery, renowned for his speed. He is the fastest thanks to the special silver skates inherited from his father, a lamplighter.


title: The Silver Skates (film)

text: The tsarist minister Nikolai Vyazemsky's daughter Alisa Vyazemskaya is interested in chemistry and the world of science, but is forced to hide her hobbies from her father, who, like many Russian aristocrats of that time, believes that a woman doesn’t need a higher education at all.


title: The Silver Skates (film)

text: A few days before the dawn of the 20th century, Matvey loses his job as a deliveryman, because he could not deliver the order on time, as the street enroute was blocked for the Vyazemskys driving along it. At the same time, he discovers that his father has consumption. At the hospital the doctor tells Matvey that there is a chance of a costly cure for his father in Germany.


title: The Silver Skates (film)

text: By chance, Matvey meets a group of pickpockets led by "Alex" named the Ice Gang, all of whom are fascinated by Marx's ideas about expropriation. Although struggling financially and unable to afford his father's treatment, Matvey trains with the Ice Gang to learn how to pickpocket in order to pay for his father's treatment. The gang challenges Matvey to steal into the Vyazemsky mansion.


title: The Silver Skates (film)

text: After some time, Matvey steals two invitations to a ball on ice in the courtyard of the Saint Michael's Castle, where he goes with Alex, posing as aristocrats.


title: The Silver Skates (film)

text: Alisa, as an aristocrat, is also there; she is introduced at the ball to the captain of the guard, Count Arkady Trubetskoy, her betrothed. Alisa and Matvey meet again and make a deal: Alisa won't reveal Matvey's disguise, but he must give permission for Alisa to enter the Bestuzhev Courses as a student: according to the law of the time, this requires the consent of a male companion or her father. Although Dmitri Mendeleev himself endorses Alisa's candidacy at the entrance exam, the idea fails, because the consent must be submitted in writing, and Matvey cannot write.


title: The Silver Skates (film)

text: Matvey's father rejects the money because of the dishonest way his son got it. Matvey quarrels with him and goes to live with Alex, who, together with his gang for the winter, huddles in the wreck of an old ship frozen into the ice on the coast of the Gulf of Finland.


title: The Silver Skates (film)

text: On Christmas, Matvey, using the fact that Alisa's parents are at the ball, persuades her to go on a date with him. The two of them skate along the canals and finally realize that they are in love with each other.


title: The Silver Skates (film)

text: The next day, Alex's gang at the fair is attacked by a specially trained squad of guards led by the Count, as the Ice Gang's actions have long attracted the attention of the city authorities.


title: The Silver Skates (film)

text: One guard manages to grab one of its members, while Matvey begins to pursue the Count, but Alex comes to his aid, who shoots the Count's leg with a pistol. Matvey decides to return home, where he finds his father has died.


title: The Silver Skates (film)

text: On the same evening, Alisa appears at the performance of the French magician Fourier, who performs a trick with flames and tells the audience that the flames come from the "energy between Arkady and Alisa". Alisa considers this a stupid farce and explains Fourier's trick to the public. Her enraged father searches her room, and finds her scientific books. They are burned, and Alisa's governess, the prim Englishwoman Miss Jackson, is fired. Miss Jackson decides that Alisa has inspired her to choose what she truly wants in life and not what other wants, and encourages Alisa to make those decisions as well even if they are difficult.


title: The Silver Skates (film)

text: Alisa runs away from home to try to escape to Paris, where she can study chemistry freely. She finds Matvey on the ship and asks him to come with her. But then, the ship is surrounded by the Prince and his soldiers, and a confrontation between them the Ice Gang, whose members have been captured by the Prince, begins. Alex sacrifices his life to save Matvey, who nearly dies of hypothermia before being taken to a hospital.


title: The Silver Skates (film)

text: New Year is coming. Alisa, who was returned home, is mentally broken. She learns that her father gave full consent to her marriage with Prince Arkady Trubetskoy.


title: The Silver Skates (film)

text: On the occasion of the New Year, Nikolai brings her to a masquerade ball at the Great Gatchina Palace. Unexpectedly, she meets Matvey in disguise, and they decide to finally escape to Paris together, using the two tickets Matvey acquired. But Matvey dropped one of the tickets, and the Prince, finding the ticket, realizes their plan and chases after them.


title: The Silver Skates (film)

text: At the Vitebsky railway station, discovering the missing ticket, Matvey persuades Alisa to get on the train, and he himself runs to the ticket offices to buy a new one, but then the Prince appears on the platform with the missing ticket.


title: The Silver Skates (film)

text: In the ensuing fight, Matvey manages to take away the ticket and he manages to jump onto the train, but Arkady manages to finally shoot him. The bullet hits the silver skates instead, and Matvey and Alisa make it to Paris.


title: The Silver Skates (film)

text: Four years later, Nikolai Vyazemsky comes to Dmitri Mendeleev and tells him he knows that he is in secret correspondence with his daughter. The proud Mendeleev tells him that Alisa has made great strides in the study of chemistry and in a year will receive an academic degree, which will allow her to work in all prestigious universities in the West.


title: The Silver Skates (film)

text: Realizing that this is the only way to return his daughter to her homeland, Vyazemsky asks the directorate of the university, where the Bestuzhev Courses are held, to amend the charter, thanks to which from now on women will be able to head the department.


title: The Silver Skates (film)

text: A year later, he watches Alisa teach a chemistry lesson in a class. The film ends with a scene in which Alisa, Matvey and their little son Petya, named after his late paternal grandfather, are ice skating together.


title: The Silver Skates (film)

text: The source of inspiration for producer Petr Anurov "may" have been the title of the book of the famous novel of the same name by the Dutch-American writer Mary Mapes Dodge. While the book and the movie share a name and include silver skates and a sick father, they tell completely unrelated stories.


title: The Silver Skates (film)

text: The film was the feature debut of director Michael Lockshin, who had previously directed shorts and commercials.


title: The Silver Skates (film)

text: Relatively unknown actors were cast in the main roles; the project was the first major film work for Fedotov and Priss, who are both from Saint Petersburg.


title: The Silver Skates (film)

text: The actors had to go through sports training for the figure skating demands of the roles. Fedotov had been playing ice hockey from the age of three, but had to learn the different skating style during three months of intensive training. Almost all the stunts in the film were performed by Fedotov. The film also involved understudies (professional skaters) and stuntmen.


title: The Silver Skates (film)

text: The company on the screen are the masters and actor of the star: Aleksei Guskov, Yuri Kolokolnikov, Severija Janusauskaite, Kirill Zaytsev, Yuri Borisov, Alexandra Revenko, Timofey Tribuntsev, Sergey Koltakov, and also stars of European cinema Denis Lavant and Cathy Belton.


title: The Silver Skates (film)

text: Vast amounts of scenery were created for the film, taken from a warehouse and installed on special structures on the Great Neva by emergency response personnel.


title: The Silver Skates (film)

text: Skates based on historical models were custom made for the film, as well as carriages, sleighs and cars of the period. Jewelry used in the film was rented from Garrard & Co and kept under guard.


title: The Silver Skates (film)

text: Principal photography was undertaken from January to May 2019. Locations in Saint Petersburg include the Peter and Paul Fortress, the Grand prince with a passage of the Saint Michael's Castle, Vitebsky railway station, and the Stieglitz Museum of Applied Arts. Scenes were also shot in Leningrad Oblast, such as at Great Gatchina Palace in the town of Gatchina. Interior scenes were filmed in Yusupov Palace, Marble Palace, Sheremetev Palace (Fountain House), as well as in the Vladimir Palace (House of Scientists).


title: The Silver Skates (film)

text: Most of the filming took place on the frozen rivers and canals of the bridges in Saint Petersburg, and comprise the largest collection of such footage. The film crew built and decorated ice fairs and skating rinks, and when the spring of 2019 began to come into its own, a large-scale decoration of the frozen Moyka River was built in the pavilion to shoot action scenes on ice.


title: The Silver Skates (film)

text: The computer graphics for the project was be handled by Alexander Gorokhov's CGF visual effects studio.


title: The Silver Skates (film)

text: About 200 specialists took part in the work on visual effects. specialists filmed and scanned the center of St. Petersburg with a special camera so that in the scenes filmed in the pavilion against the background of a chroma key, real architectural objects could be built in post-production.


title: The Silver Skates (film)

text: The film was called "scandalous" by journalists because of the initiation of a case by Rosprirodnadzor (Federal Service for Supervision of Natural Resources). The residents of St. Petersburg were initially surprised to see how public utilities cleared snow from the ice at the Moyka River, Kryukov Canal and Griboyedov Canal were covered with blue wooden slabs and film studio agents appeared nearby.


title: The Silver Skates (film)

text: The original film soundtrack was composed by Guy Farley and recorded by the London Symphony Orchestra at Abbey Road Studios, is composed of 24 numbers, 2 of which directly quote the famous piano piece "Moonlight" by Claude Debussy, arranged for orchestra.


title: The Silver Skates (film)

text: The Final Waltz from the ballet "The Nutcracker" by Pyotr Tchaikovsky, Scene with dances from the Prologue of the ballet "The Sleeping Beauty".


title: The Silver Skates (film)

text: "Russian Easter Festival Overture", Op. 36; The dance of buffoons from the opera "The Snow Maiden" by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov.


title: The Silver Skates (film)

text: The first teaser trailer of "The Silver Skates" was released on June 19, 2019. The second trailer was released on October 10, 2019.


title: The Silver Skates (film)

text: The film was initially scheduled to be released in early February 2020. After being postponed by six months, "The Silver Skates" premiered as the opening film of the 42nd Moscow International Film Festival in October 2020, where Nikita Mikhalkov is the president.


title: The Silver Skates (film)

text: "The Silver Skates" had a special screening on December 3, 2020 at the Alexandrinsky Theatre in Saint Petersburg, and its world premiere was held on December 8, at the Karo 11 October cinema center in Moscow.


title: The Silver Skates (film)

text: It is scheduled to be theatrically released in the Russian Federation on December 10, 2020 by the Central Partnership, domestically representing the international distributor Paramount Pictures.


title: The Silver Skates (film)

text: The film received high marks in the Russian press; according to aggregators, there were no negative reviews at all.


title: The Silver Skates (film)

text: "The full-length debut of director Michael Lockshin was definitely a success," Valery Kichin writes in Russian Gazette.


title: The Silver Skates (film)

text: Many of the critics have highlighted the vintage aesthetics, the film's dreamlike atmosphere and music. Anton Dolin in Meduza also noted the social subtext of the plot: "The central conflict of the Silver Skates - it seems for the first time in the domestic film mainstream - is associated with the liberation of the heroine from the bonds of patriarchy."


title: The Silver Skates (film)

text: Western press reacted coldly to the film; currently Silver Skates holds a 33% on Rotten Tomatoes. John Serba of Decider called the film "bland" and "at best an empty, escapist, mostly guilty near-pleasure."


title: Maria Fitzherbert

text: Maria Anne Fitzherbert ("née" Smythe, previously Weld; 26 July 1756 – 27 March 1837) was a longtime companion of George, Prince of Wales (later King George IV of the United Kingdom). In 1785, they secretly contracted a marriage that was invalid under English civil law because his father, King George III, had not consented to it. Fitzherbert was a Catholic and the law at the time forbade Catholics or spouses of Catholics from becoming monarch, so had the marriage been approved and valid, the Prince of Wales would have lost his place in the line of succession. Before marrying George, Fitzherbert had been twice widowed. Her nephew from her first marriage, Cardinal Weld, persuaded Pope Pius VII to declare the marriage sacramentally valid.


title: Maria Fitzherbert

text: Fitzherbert was born at Tong Castle in Shropshire. She was the eldest child of Walter Smythe (c. 1721–1788) of Brambridge, Hampshire, younger son of Sir John Smythe, 3rd Baronet, of Acton Burnell, Shropshire. Her mother was Mary Ann Errington of Beaufront, Northumberland, maternal half-sister of Charles William Molyneux, 1st Earl of Sefton. Fitzherbert was educated in Paris at a French convent.


title: Maria Fitzherbert

text: At sixteen, Maria married Edward Weld, 16 years her senior, a rich Catholic widower and landowner of Lulworth Castle in July 1775. Weld died just three months later, after a fall from his horse; having failed to sign his new will, his estate went to his younger brother Thomas, the father of fifteen children, including the future Cardinal Weld. His widow was left effectively destitute, had little or no financial support from the Weld family, and was obliged to remarry as soon as she was able.


title: Maria Fitzherbert

text: Three years later in 1778, she married secondly Thomas Fitzherbert of Swynnerton, Staffordshire. He was ten years her senior. They had a son who died young. She was widowed again on 7 May 1781. He left her an annuity of £1,000 (£ in ), and a town house in Park Street, Mayfair.


title: Maria Fitzherbert

text: The twice-widowed Fitzherbert soon entered London high society. In spring, 1784, she was introduced to a youthful admirer: George, Prince of Wales, six years her junior. The prince became infatuated with her and pursued her endlessly until she agreed to marry him. Secretly, and – as both parties were well aware – against the law, they went through a form of marriage on 15 December 1785, in the drawing room of her house in Park Street, London. Her uncle, Henry Errington, and her brother, John Smythe, were the witnesses. This invalid marriage ceremony was performed by one of the prince's Chaplains in Ordinary, the Reverend Robert Burt, whose debts of £500 (£ in ) were paid by the prince to release him from Fleet Prison.


title: Maria Fitzherbert

text: The marriage was not valid under English law because it had not received the prior approval of King George III and the Privy Council as required by the Royal Marriages Act 1772. Had approval been sought, it might not have been granted for many reasons including, for example, Fitzherbert's Catholic religion. Had consent been given and the marriage been legal, the Prince of Wales would have been automatically removed from the succession to the British throne under the provisions of the Bill of Rights and the Act of Settlement 1701 and replaced as heir-apparent by his brother, the Duke of York. In a similar vein, their brother, Prince Augustus Frederick, contracted an invalid marriage with Lady Augusta Murray in 1793 without the King's consent and had two children with her.


title: Maria Fitzherbert

text: On 23 June 1794, Fitzherbert was informed by letter that her relationship with the Prince was over. George told his younger brother, the Duke of York, that he and Fitzherbert were "parted, but parted amicably", conveying his intention to marry their first cousin, Duchess Caroline of Brunswick. According to King George III it was the only way out of a hole: his heir apparent's enormous debts of £600,000 (£ in ) would be paid the day he wed. So the Prince married Caroline on 8 April 1795. However, in 1796, three days after Caroline gave birth to their daughter, Princess Charlotte of Wales, on 10 January, the Prince of Wales wrote his last will and testament, bequeathing all his "worldly property ... to my Maria Fitzherbert, my wife, the wife of my heart and soul". Although by the laws of the country she "could not avail herself publicly of that name, still such she is in the eyes of Heaven, was, is, and ever will be such in mine". However, this did not lead to a reunion. The Prince finally sought a reconciliation with his "second self" during the summer of 1798. By then, he had separated from Caroline for good and was bored with his mistress, Frances Villiers, Countess of Jersey.


title: Maria Fitzherbert

text: During the first few years of his reign as King George IV, he turned violently against Fitzherbert and several of his former associates. Whenever he mentioned her name it was "with feelings of disgust and horror", claiming that their union "was an artificial marriage ... just to satisfy her; that it was no marriage – for there could be none without a licence or some written document." Fitzherbert was in possession of documents and after their final break her demands for her annuity payments were often accompanied by veiled threats to go public with her papers if she did not receive the funds. In June 1830, when the King was dying, he eagerly seized her "get well soon" letter and, after reading it, placed it under his pillow. Fitzherbert – who had no idea just how ill he was – was deeply hurt that he had never replied to her final letter. However, before dying, the King asked to be buried with Fitzherbert's eye miniature around his neck, which was done.


title: Maria Fitzherbert

text: Following the death of George IV on 26 June 1830, it was discovered that he had kept all of Fitzherbert's letters, and steps were taken to destroy them. Fitzherbert told George IV's brother, King William IV, about their marriage and showed him the document in her possession. He "begged her to accept the title of Duchess, but she refused, asking only permission to wear widow's weeds and to dress her servants in royal livery".


title: Maria Fitzherbert

text: Architect William Porden designed Steine House, on the west side of Old Steine in Brighton, for Fitzherbert. She lived there from 1804 until her death in 1837. She was buried at St John the Baptist's Church, Brighton, a church built largely with her funds. The memorial sculpture in the nave shows her wearing three wedding rings.


title: Maria Fitzherbert

text: Some scholars have suggested that Maria Fitzherbert had one, possibly two, children by her marriage to the future king. "In 1833, after the King's death, one of [his] executors, Lord Stourton, asked her to sign a declaration he had written on the back of her marriage certificate. It read: 'I Mary Fitzherbert ... testify that my Union with George P. of Wales was without issue.' According to Stourton, she, smiling, objected, on the score of delicacy." Indeed, during her early days in Brighton with the Prince of Wales, his uncle, the Duke of Gloucester, and other friends believed Mrs. Fitzherbert to be pregnant.


title: Maria Fitzherbert

text: Members of the Wyatt family claim to being descendants of George IV by her. On Fitzherbert's death it is stated that her children were adopted by a Scottish family, named Wyatt, whose name they assumed. Afterward they came south, settling in Erith, Kent. The Wyatt family, in the person of J. G. Wyatt, a former Erith man who later moved to Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, Canada, and Isabella Annie Wyatt, claimed title to a portion of the Fitzherbert estate in 1937.


title: Maria Fitzherbert

text: One suggested child of the Prince and his longtime paramour was James Ord (born 1786), whose curious history of assisted relocations and encouragement has been chronicled. Ord eventually emigrated to the United States where he worked first near Norfolk, Virginia, as a shipbuilder, next in Charles County, Maryland, in ship construction, and then on a farm outside of Washington, D.C. He joined the Society of Jesus in 1806, but left the order in 1811. Soon thereafter, Ord joined the Navy, but he served in the infantry during the War of 1812. Ord lived in Allegheny County, Maryland, from 1815 to 1819, in Washington, D.C., from 1819 to 1837, in Sault Sainte Marie, Michigan, in the mid-1800s, and in California after 1855. James Ord died in 1873.


title: Maria Fitzherbert

text: In addition to James Ord, the long-term relationship between Fitzherbert and George, as prince and king, appears to have led to more than a dozen claims of children conceived out of wedlock. These join the many additional catalogued cases of George's liaisons, some of which have received further discussion "vis-a-vis" largely inexplicable financial care given by King George IV or his peers to the immediate purported descendant.


title: Maria Fitzherbert

text: Edward VII, the Prince's great-nephew, granted permission to historian and Fitzherbert biographer William H. Wilkins to open her vault at Coutts Bank in 1906. The release of Wilkins' book later that year prompted several supposed descendants of the Prince and Fitzherbert to claim the latter's substantial estate. A Rebecca Fitzherbert Harris of Kenvil, New Jersey, maintained that through family lore she was the great-granddaughter of the couple via a purported son named Thomas Edward, named after Fitzherbert's first two husbands. In a letter to Edward VII, Harris claimed that Thomas also had a brother and sister who lived for a time with their mother in Dublin. Thomas was supposedly sent to the United States in 1833 by Fitzherbert, who thought her children would be safer there following her death. Harris further stated that her family had received an income from an unknown source in the United Kingdom for many years. Harris requested access to Fitzherbert's papers to pursue her claim of the estate. Edward VII was noted to have acknowledged Harris's letter but stated that he would not assist her further.


title: Maria Fitzherbert

text: The second codicil to Maria Fitzherbert's will outlines her two principal beneficiaries, and includes a personal note: "this paper is addressed to my two dear children ... I have loved them both with the tenderest affection any mother could do, and I have done the utmost in my power for their interests and comfort".


title: Maria Fitzherbert

text: Their married names were Mary Ann Stafford-Jerningham and Mary Georgina Emma Dawson-Damer. Stafford-Jerningham was nominally Fitzherbert's 'niece', and was raised as Mary Ann Smythe. Dawson-Damer was nominally the daughter of Admiral Lord Hugh Seymour and Lady Anna Horatia Waldegrave. Seymour had been a close associate of George IV since their youth, and Seymour's son George was an executor and minor beneficiary of Fitzherbert's will. There is no evidence that either of these women were the natural children of Maria Fitzherbert – indeed the reference to 'the affection any mother could do' (with stress on mother) could indicate she only saw herself as a mother-figure to them, and no more. The will makes no reference to any sons, though this observation must be seen in its historic context; of the ten illegitimate children of Dorothea Jordan, Anglo-Irish actress and mistress of 20 years to the Duke of Clarence, later King William IV, care for the five boys was initially assumed by their father and his households, and custody and care for the girls given to Jordan.


title: Maria Fitzherbert

text: Notably, any such historical claim of descent is accompanied by controversy, and many of the preceding have been challenged. Given the death of Princess Charlotte without surviving children, should the Ord link be substantiated, the line descended through them would join a large number of claimed surviving descendants of King George IV.


title: Maria Fitzherbert

text: Fitzherbert was described as having an aquiline nose and loose teeth. She had hazel eyes, silky blonde hair, and a flawless complexion.


title: Robert Oliveri

text: Robert Dane Oliveri (born April 28, 1978) is an American former child actor. He is best known for his portrayal of Nick Szalinski in the 1989 Disney film, "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids", for which he was nominated for a Young Artist Award and a Saturn Award. He reprised the role in the 1992 sequel, "Honey, I Blew Up the Kid" and the 3D short film, "Honey, I Shrunk the Audience!" He is also known for playing Kevin, Winona Ryder's younger brother, in Tim Burton's "Edward Scissorhands". He and Marcia Strassman, who played his mother in the first and 2nd "Honey" films, have the same birthday.


title: Robert Oliveri

text: At age nine, Oliveri starred as Paul Bard in an episode of "ABC Afterschool Special". Two years later he made a guest appearance on " " as Mike Carlson. That same year, he starred as Young Nelson in the television movie, "Ask Me Again". Also that year, he landed the role of Nick Szalinski, the son of Rick Moranis's character in "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids".


title: Robert Oliveri

text: For his performance, he was nominated for a Young Artist Award and a Saturn Award. In 1990, Oliveri starred as Danny Flocken in the pilot of "The Flockens", a show about raising four boys, which also starred Miriam Flynn and Bruce McGill as the parents. The show was not picked up and dismissed. He starred in a 1990 episode of the TV series "Monsters" and then landed the role of Kevin in "Edward Scissorhands" with Johnny Depp and Winona Ryder.


title: Robert Oliveri

text: He later starred in an episode of "ABC Weekend Special" as Ryan in "Ralph S. Mouse". The next year, Oliveri reprised his role as Nick Szalinski in 1992's "Honey, I Blew Up the Kid". His character had matured since the previous film and took a liking to Mandy Park, which was Keri Russell's film debut. Oliveri was asked to reprise his role as Szalinski again two years later for the 3D science fiction short film used in the "Honey, I Shrunk the Audience!" attraction, at several Disney theme parks, from 1994 to 2010.


title: Claes Oldenburg

text: Claes Oldenburg (January 28, 1929 – July 18, 2022) was a Swedish-born American sculptor, best known for his public art installations typically featuring large replicas of everyday objects. Another theme in his work is soft sculpture versions of everyday objects. Many of his works were made in collaboration with his wife, Coosje van Bruggen, who died in 2009; they had been married for 32 years. Oldenburg lived and worked in New York City.


title: Claes Oldenburg

text: Claes Oldenburg was born on January 28, 1929, in Stockholm, the son of Gösta Oldenburg and his wife Sigrid Elisabeth née Lindforss. His father was then a Swedish diplomat stationed in New York and in 1936 was appointed consul general of Sweden to Chicago where Oldenburg grew up, attending the Latin School of Chicago. He studied literature and art history at Yale University from 1946 to 1950, then returned to Chicago where he took classes at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. While further developing his craft, he worked as a reporter at the City News Bureau of Chicago. He also opened his own studio and, in 1953, became a naturalized citizen of the United States. In 1956, he moved to New York, and for a time worked in the library of the Cooper Union Museum for the Arts of Decoration, where he also took the opportunity to learn more, on his own, about the history of art.


title: Claes Oldenburg

text: Oldenburg's first recorded sales of artworks were at the 57th Street Art Fair in Chicago, where he sold 5 items for a total price of $25. He moved back to New York City in 1956. There he met a number of artists, including Jim Dine, Red Grooms, and Allan Kaprow, whose happenings incorporated theatrical aspects and provided an alternative to the abstract expressionism that had come to dominate much of the art scene. Oldenburg began toying with the idea of soft sculpture in 1957, when he completed a free-hanging piece made from a woman's stocking stuffed with newspaper. (The piece was untitled when he made it but is now referred to as "Sausage".)


title: Claes Oldenburg

text: By 1960, Oldenburg had produced sculptures containing simply rendered figures, letters, and signs, inspired by the Lower East Side neighborhood where he lived, made out of materials such as cardboard, burlap, and newspapers; in 1961, he shifted his method, creating sculptures from chicken wire covered with plaster-soaked canvas and enamel paint, depicting everyday objects – articles of clothing and food items. Oldenburg's first show which included three-dimensional works, in May 1959, was at the Judson Gallery, at Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square. During this time, artist Robert Beauchamp described Oldenburg as "brilliant", due to the reaction that the pop artist brought to a "dull" abstract expressionist period.


title: Claes Oldenburg

text: In the 1960s, Oldenburg became associated with the pop art movement and created many so-called "happenings", which were performance art related productions of that time. The name he gave to his own productions was "Ray Gun Theater". The cast of colleagues who appeared in his performances included artists Lucas Samaras, Tom Wesselmann, Carolee Schneemann, Oyvind Fahlstrom and Richard Artschwager, art gallerist Annina Nosei, critic Barbara Rose, and screenwriter Rudy Wurlitzer. His first wife (1960–1970) Patty Mucha (Patricia Muchinski), who sewed many of his early soft sculptures, was a constant performer in his happenings. His brash, often humorous, approach to art was at great odds with the prevailing sensibility that, by its nature, art dealt with "profound" expressions or ideas. But Oldenburg's spirited art found first a niche then a great popularity that endures to this day. In December 1961, he rented a store on Manhattan's Lower East Side to house "The Store", a month-long installation he had first presented at the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York, stocked with sculptures roughly in the form of consumer goods.


title: Claes Oldenburg

text: Oldenburg moved to Los Angeles in 1963 "because it was the most opposite thing to New York [he] could think of". That same year, he conceived "AUT OBO DYS", performed in the parking lot of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics in December 1963. In 1965, he turned his attention to drawings and projects for imaginary outdoor monuments. Initially these monuments took the form of small collages such as a crayon image of a fat, fuzzy teddy bear looming over the grassy fields of New York's Central Park (1965) and "Lipsticks in Piccadilly Circus, London" (1966). In 1967, New York city cultural adviser Sam Green realized Oldenburg's first outdoor public monument; "Placid Civic Monument" took the form of a Conceptual performance/action behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, with a crew of gravediggers digging a 6-by-3-foot rectangular hole in the ground. In 1969, Oldenberg contributed a drawing to the Moon Museum. "Geometric Mouse-Scale A, Black 1/6", also from 1969, was selected to be part of the Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller Empire State Plaza Art Collection in Albany, New York.


title: Claes Oldenburg

text: Many of Oldenburg's large-scale sculptures of mundane objects elicited ridicule before being accepted. For example, the 1969 "Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks", was removed from its original place in Beinecke Plaza at Yale University, and "circulated on a loan basis to other campuses". English art critic Ellen H. Johnson says that with its "bright color, contemporary form and material and its ignoble subject, it attacked the sterility and pretentiousness of the classicistic building behind it". The artist "pointed out it opposed levity to solemnity, color to colorlessness, metal to stone, simple to a sophisticated tradition. In theme, it is both phallic, life-engendering, and a bomb, the harbinger of death. Male in form, it is female in subject". One of a number of Oldenburg's sculptures that possess interactive capabilities, it now resides in the Morse College courtyard.


title: Claes Oldenburg

text: From the early 1970s on, Oldenburg concentrated almost exclusively on public commissions. His first public work, "Three-Way Plug" came on commission from Oberlin College with a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. His collaboration with Dutch/American writer and art historian Coosje van Bruggen dates from 1976. They were married in 1977. Oldenburg officially signed all the work he did from 1981 on with both his own name and van Bruggen's. Their first collaboration came when Oldenburg was commissioned to rework "Trowel I", a 1971 sculpture of an oversize garden tool, for the grounds of the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo in the Netherlands.


title: Claes Oldenburg

text: In 1988, the two created the iconic "Spoonbridge and Cherry" sculpture for the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. It remains a staple of the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden as well as a classic image of the city. "Typewriter Eraser, Scale X" (1999) is in the National Gallery of Art Sculpture Garden. Another well known construction by the duo is the "Free Stamp" in downtown Cleveland.


title: Claes Oldenburg

text: In addition to freestanding projects, they occasionally contributed to architectural projects, among them, two Los Angeles projects in collaboration with architect Frank Gehry: "Toppling Ladder With Spilling Paint", which was installed at Loyola Law School in 1986, and the building-mounted sculpture "Giant Binoculars", completed in Venice Beach in 1991. The couple's collaboration with Gehry also involved a return to performance for Oldenburg when the trio presented "Il Corso del Coltello", in Venice, Italy, in 1985; other characters were portrayed by Germano Celant and Pontus Hultén. "Coltello" is the source of "Knife Ship", a large-scale sculpture that served as the central prop; it was later seen in Los Angeles in 1988 when Oldenburg, van Bruggen and Gehry presented "Coltello Recalled: Reflections on a Performance" at the Japanese American Cultural & Community Center and the exhibition "Props, Costumes and Designs for the Performance "Il Corso del Coltello"" at Margo Leavin Gallery.


title: Claes Oldenburg

text: The city of Milan, Italy, commissioned the work known as "Needle, Thread and Knot" (Italian: Ago, filo e nodo) which was installed in 2000 in the Piazzale Cadorna. In 2001, Oldenburg and van Bruggen created "Dropped Cone", a huge inverted ice cream cone, on top of a shopping center in Cologne, Germany. Installed at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 2011, "Paint Torch" is a towering pop sculpture of a paintbrush, capped with bristles that are illuminated at night. The sculpture is installed at a daring 60-degree angle, as if in the act of painting. In 2018, "The Maze" was included in "1968: Sparta Dreaming Athens" at Château de Montsoreau-Museum of Contemporary Art.


title: Claes Oldenburg

text: Oldenburg's first one-man show, in 1959 at the Judson Gallery in New York, had shown figurative drawings and papier-mâché sculptures. He was honored with a solo exhibition of his work at the Moderna Museet (organized by Pontus Hultén), in 1966; the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1969; London's Tate Gallery in 1970 (chronicled in a 1970 twin-projection documentary by James Scott called "The Great Ice Cream Robbery"); and with a retrospective organized by Germano Celant at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 1995 (travelling to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Bonn; and Hayward Gallery, London). In 2002, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York held a retrospective of the drawings of Oldenburg and van Bruggen; the same year, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York exhibited a selection of their sculptures on the roof of the museum.


title: Claes Oldenburg

text: In 1989, Oldenburg won the Wolf Prize in Arts. In 2000, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts. Oldenburg received honorary degrees from Oberlin College, Ohio, in 1970; Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois, in 1979; Bard College, New York, in 1995; and Royal College of Art, London, in 1996, as well as the following awards: Brandeis University Sculpture Award, 1971; Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture, 1972; Art Institute of Chicago, First Prize Sculpture Award, 72nd American Exhibition, 1976; Medal, American Institute of Architects, 1977; Wilhelm-Lehmbruck Prize for Sculpture, Duisburg, Germany, 1981; Brandeis University Creative Arts Award for Lifetime Artistic Achievement, The Jack I. and Lillian Poses Medal for Sculpture, 1993; Rolf Schock Foundation Prize, Stockholm, Sweden, 1995. He was a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters from 1975 on and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences from 1978.


title: Claes Oldenburg

text: Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen together received honorary degrees from the California College of the Arts, San Francisco, California, in 1996; University of Teesside, Middlesbrough, England, in 1999; Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 2005; the College for Creative Studies in Detroit, Michigan, in 2005, and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, 2011. Awards for their collaboration include the Distinction in Sculpture, SculptureCenter, New York (1994); Nathaniel S. Saltonstall Award, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (1996); Partners in Education Award, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2002); and Medal Award, School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2004).


title: Claes Oldenburg

text: In her 16-minute, 16mm film "Manhattan Mouse Museum" (2011), artist Tacita Dean captured Oldenburg in his studio as he gently handles and dusts the small objects that line his bookshelves. The film is less about the artist's iconography than the embedded intellectual process which allowed him to transform everyday objects into remarkable sculptural forms.


title: Claes Oldenburg

text: Patty Mucha, who was married to Claes Oldenburg from 1960 to 1970, first met him after moving to New York City in 1957 to become an artist. When Oldenburg was painting portraits, Mucha became one of his nude models before becoming his first wife. An Oldenburg drawing of Mucha titled "Pat Reading in Bed, Lenox", 1959 is in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art. She was a collaborator in Oldenburg's happenings by coming up with ideas together, making the costumes together, and was also a performer in the piece, along with collaborating on happenings, she also as well, sewed his famous floor hamburger, ice cream, and cake. Mucha was lead singer in the band The Druds who were a band of artists including Andy Warhol, LaMonte Young, Lucas Samaras, and Walter DeMaria pre-velvet underground.


title: Claes Oldenburg

text: Between 1969 and 1977, Oldenburg was in a relationship with the feminist artist and sculptor, Hannah Wilke, who died in 1993. They shared several studios and traveled together, and Wilke often photographed him.


title: Claes Oldenburg

text: Oldenburg and his second wife, Coosje van Bruggen, met in 1970 when Oldenburg's first major retrospective traveled to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, where van Bruggen was a curator. The couple were married in 1977.


title: Claes Oldenburg

text: In 1992, Oldenburg and van Bruggen acquired Château de la Borde, a small Loire Valley chateau, whose music room gave them the idea of making a domestically sized collection. Van Bruggen and Oldenburg renovated the house, decorating it with modernist pieces by among others Le Corbusier, Charles and Ray Eames, and Alvar Aalto, Frank Gehry, Eileen Gray. Van Bruggen died on January 10, 2009, from the effects of breast cancer.


title: Claes Oldenburg

text: Oldenburg's brother, art historian Richard E. Oldenburg, was director of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, between 1972 and 1993, and later chairman of Sotheby's America.


title: Claes Oldenburg

text: Oldenburg's sculpture "Typewriter Eraser" (1976), the third piece from an edition of three, was sold for $2.2 million at Christie's New York in 2009.


title: Vålerenga Fotball

text: Vålerenga Fotball () is a Norwegian association football club from Oslo and a part of the multi-sport club Vålerengens IF. Founded in 1913, the club is named after the neighbourhood of Vålerenga. Vålerenga's home ground is Intility Arena, located in Valle-Hovin. Vålerenga are five-time league champions and four-time Norwegian Football Cup champions, having last won the league in 2005 and the cup in 2008.


title: Vålerenga Fotball

text: The history of Vålerenga Fotball goes back to "Fotballpartiet Spark", which was founded in 1898 by pastor Hans Møller Gasmann. An early mission for Gasmann was to give the local youth social activity and exercise. On a larger scale, the club was part of the movement known as Muscular Christianity. A successor to this football club, "Idrettslaget Spring", was founded on 29 July 1913 by a group of teenage factory workers. A year later, the club changed its name to "Vaalerengens Idrættsforening". Rooted in the neighborhood of Vålerenga on the east end of Oslo, the club would recruit players and supporters from the many workers in the area, in a society then characterized for its low mobility between social strata. Within its first seasons, Vålerengen would compete with the major clubs in Oslo at that time; Lyn, Mercantile and Frigg. Where Lyn and Frigg had a strong identity with the academia and the upper classes, Vålerengen developed a working class identity.


title: Vålerenga Fotball

text: Vålerengens Idrettsforening had mixed success in its first years, but fortunes improved as the 1920s came around and the club secured promotion to the Oslo Championships in 1921. Vålerengen won the Oslo Championships four times before a national league (Norgesserien) was established in 1937. In the 1948–49 season, Vålerengen finished second.


title: Vålerenga Fotball

text: After this period, Vålerengen entered a period of instability, being relegated from the top division two times in the 1950s.


title: Vålerenga Fotball

text: The charismatic Helmuth Steffens became a central figure in building up the culture in the club after the war. At the beginning of the 1960s, a new generation of local players broke into Vålerengen's first squad. Players like Einar Bruno Larsen, Terje Hellerud and Leif Eriksen became core personalities of a group of players which eventually became known as "Bohemene" ("The Bohemians"). The club would become known for its brilliant style of football as the number of people in the audience increased. The players became popular for their charismatic, witty comments and light hearted humour. Vålerengen secured a third place in 1961.


title: Vålerenga Fotball

text: In 1965, Vålerengen won the First Division for the first time. By the help of manager Helmuth Steffens and head coach Anton Ploderer, the club had managed to win the title with a team of local players. The league was won in dramatic fashion, with arch-rivals Lyn giving Vålerengen a fight for the title until the final matches of the season.


title: Vålerenga Fotball

text: The Bohemian era came to an end when the club was relegated from the First Division in 1968 and then again to the Third Division in 1970. Vålerengen did not achieve promotion to the top league again until 1974. In 1976, Vålerenga signed Odd Iversen, who at the time had 112 First Division goals to his name. Iversen would help the club reestablish itself in the First Division.


title: Vålerenga Fotball

text: The 80s saw the emergence of a new generation. With the help of players like Tom Jacobsen and Vidar Davidsen, Vålerengen would win its first cup title in 1980.


title: Vålerenga Fotball

text: Led by head coach Leif Eriksen, the team won the First Division title for the second time in 1981 with a style of play characterized by intensity and discipline. The club was unable to reclaim the league title in 1982, but won it again in 1983 and 1984. During the decade, Vålerengen would also become twice runners-up in the cup and also achieve a third place in the league in 1985. Vålerengen had become a stable top team for the first and, to date, only time.


title: Vålerenga Fotball

text: 1985 also saw the signing of striker Jørn Andersen, who would go on to score 23 goals in 22 matches in his sole season for Vålerengen. However, as the club had miscalculated the home crowd average, the club entered severe financial difficulties. Vålerenga was saved from bankruptcy in 1987.


title: Vålerenga Fotball

text: In 1990, now known as Vålerenga, the club was relegated after 14 seasons in the top division. Vålerenga was close to further relegation in the 1992 season, but managed to remain in the second highest division thanks to a last round 3–0 win against Eik-Tønsberg IF. In 1994, Vålerenga returned to the top division, but were relegated again in 1996. In 1997 Vålerenga won the cup and the 1. divisjon and were again promoted to Tippeligaen. As earlier in the 1990s, the stay in the top division lasted only a few years.


title: Vålerenga Fotball

text: In the 2000 season Vålerenga lost the play-off matches against Sogndal and was relegated to the 1. divisjon. Vålerenga returned to Tippeligaen and won the cup in 2002.


title: Vålerenga Fotball

text: The 2003 season was poor for Vålerenga and they wound up third last in the league sending them into play-offs against Sandefjord to avoid relegation. The result was a 0–0 draw in Sandefjord and a 5–3 victory in Oslo and so Vålerenga retained the position in the top league and avoided relegation.


title: Vålerenga Fotball

text: Vålerenga rebounded nicely in the 2004 season and proved a serious challenge to the dominant Rosenborg team in the bid for the league's gold medal. After a frantic final round where Vålerenga beat Stabæk 3–0, they missed out on the league title since Rosenborg beat FK Lyn, Vålerenga's city rivals 4–1. Vålerenga won the silver medal, finishing 2nd to Rosenborg equal on points and goal difference, but Vålerenga had scored fewer goals than Rosenborg during the season, leaving Rosenborg as league champions.


title: Vålerenga Fotball

text: At the start of the 2005 season it was apparent that Rosenborg was in bad shape and it seemed like Vålerenga's season to go all the way. After a strong season opening, the surprise of the season IK Start – newly promoted to the Tippeligaen – looked to give Vålerenga a fight to the finish, and the two clubs basically alternated on leading the series to the final round. On 29 October it looked to be a thrilling last round reminiscent of the previous year, as both Start and Vålerenga had exactly the same number of points, but Start with a slightly better goal difference. Start met Fredrikstad FK at home, while Vålerenga met Odd Grenland away. Eventually Fredrikstad, who faced relegation if they lost, beat Start 3–1 while at the same time Vålerenga managed a 2–2 draw against Odd Grenland. Vålerenga stepped one up from the previous year, and won the title with a one-point margin. The title was Vålerenga's first league title in 21 years, ending Rosenborg's 13-year reign as league champions.


title: Vålerenga Fotball

text: The follow-up season of 2006 did not start out as well for the reigning champions, and a poor start left them at the bottom of the table after seven rounds, having gained only 5 points. A steady rise in form though still brought the team to 6th place by the time the season was half-through. Late July brought a string of bad results, including embarrassing losses to main rival FK Lyn, and the exit from the UEFA Champions League, after losing 5–3 on aggregate to Czech club Mladá Boleslav in the 2nd qualifying round. Vålerenga had aimed to qualify for the tournament after missing out the previous year by being defeated by Belgian side Club Brugge on a penalty shoot-out. After losing five out of seven games between 22 July and 19 August head-coach Kjetil Rekdal announced his resignation. Assistant coach Petter Myhre took over as interim manager, and as a result the club regained their form and scored 25 out of the last 30 possible points, bringing the club to a third place in the league, as well as a qualification spot for the 2007–08 Europa League. Vålerenga also qualified for play in the 2006–07 Scandinavian Royal League after finishing among the top four teams in Norway. In October 2006, Petter Myhre was hired on a permanent basis, but he would resign in July 2007, following a string of bad results.


title: Vålerenga Fotball

text: In November 2007, Martin Andresen signed a three-year contract to become the next manager of Vålerenga. Heavy investment from owners and investors saw the signing of several high-profile players, most notably Lars Iver Strand and Kristoffer Hæstad. However, despite winning the 2008 Norwegian Football Cup, the following season was a disappointment, with Vålerenga finishing 10th in the league. In the 2009 season, Vålerenga finished 7th, reaching the semifinal in the cup. 2010 saw a revitalized Vålerenga, led by a trio of effective forwards, Mohammed Abdellaoue, Bengt Sæternes and Luton Shelton. Vålerenga finished second in the league.


title: Vålerenga Fotball

text: However, Vålerenga could not repeat the success in 2011 and 2012. In October 2012, Andresen and Vålerenga agreed to part ways.


title: Vålerenga Fotball

text: Kjetil Rekdal returned to the club as head coach in January 2013. Facing economic difficulties from previous seasons and being without a shirt sponsorship deal, Vålerenga spent much of the 2014 season dealing with a severe risk of bankruptcy, finally signing a new shirt sponsorship deal with DnB on 29 July. The signing of striker Vidar Örn Kjartansson in front of 2014 season proved to be a huge success, with the Icelandic player scoring 25 goals in 29 games, helping the Oslo club secure a sixth place in the league after a drop in form in the latter half of the season.


title: Vålerenga Fotball

text: On 13 July 2016, Ronny Deila was appointed as the new head coach. Deila was originally planned to take over in January 2017, but was involved in the coaching team for the final games of the 2016 season. Kjetil Rekdal was to become director of sports, but left the club in early 2017. In December 2019, Ronny Deila left to become the coach of New York City Football Club. In January 2020, Dag-Eilev Fagermo became the new head coach.


title: Vålerenga Fotball

text: Vålerenga moved into their newly built stadium, Intility Arena, in September 2017. This was a historic move for the club, after spending 104 years without owning a home stadium. The new stadium is also close to Vålerenga neighborhood of Oslo.


title: Vålerenga Fotball

text: Up to 1913, Vålerenga's kit was moss green. In 1914, the Norwegian State Railways had a set of blue and red kits left over, which Vålerenga bought cheaply, so their official colours became blue and red. The 2006 season away kit was white with a touch of moss green.


title: Vålerenga Fotball

text: In 2017, Vålerenga opened their own home ground at Valle Hovin in Eastern Oslo, called Intility Arena. The stadium has a capacity of 17,333 on domestic games (15,389 on international games), and the playing surface is artificial grass. The very first match in the ground saw the Vålerenga women's team beat Kolbotn Fotball 2–0 on 9 September 2017, with Stephanie Verdoia being the first ever goalscorer on the Arena. The next day, the men's team lost 2–1 to Sarpsborg 08 in their first game at the stadium. The ground was first called Vålerenga kultur- og idrettspark, before the club agreed a contract with the IT company Intility to rename the stadium.


title: Vålerenga Fotball

text: Following a press statement made on 15 May 2008, Vålerenga announced that they would be moving home to Valle Hovin after purchasing the area of the proposed stadium for the symbolic sum of 1 Norwegian Krone. In late 2014, the plans were accepted by the city council of Oslo. On 10 June 2014, the European Free Trade Association Surveillance Authority accepted the plans for the stadium.


title: Vålerenga Fotball

text: The foundation stone of the new stadium was laid on 29 July 2015, the club's 102nd anniversary. Construction was begun in the summer of 2015 and is planned to be completed in 2017.


title: Vålerenga Fotball

text: Before moving into Intility Arena, the Ullevaal Stadion was the home ground, a stadium owned jointly by the Football Association of Norway and Vital Eiendom.


title: Vålerenga Fotball

text: From the 1960s till the 1980s and a short period in the end of the 1990s Bislett Stadium was Vålerenga's home ground. Bislett Stadium also hosted speed skating and track and field events in addition to football, and hosted the 1952 Winter Olympics. Poor conditions and maintenance of Bislett forced Vålerenga to move to Ullevaal and a groundshare with FK Lyn.


title: Vålerenga Fotball

text: After Vålerenga moved from Bislett Stadium plans for building their own ground were conceived, but poor results on the field combined with financial problems kept those plans at bay for a few years. After the second place in 2004 and the league title in 2005 as well as business man John Fredriksen's deletion of the club's debt in 2003, the talks of building a ground for Vålerenga resurfaced.


title: Vålerenga Fotball

text: Vålerenga has traditionally drawn support from the area around Vålerenga, Oslo and various other places on the east end of Oslo, although today these lines are largely blurred and the club has supporters all over Oslo and the surrounding areas. Up until the early 90s, Vålerenga's supporters were loosely organised. The supporters were sometimes referred to as "Apeberget", but this is actually a misnomer from a journalist. An independent supporter club called "Klanen" ("The Clan") was founded in 1991. It has around 10,000 members today. The senior team of Vålerenga has reserved shirt number 12 for their supporters. Vålerenga's supporters, and specifically Klanen, are widely considered to be the best football supporters in Norway.


title: Vålerenga Fotball

text: Vålerenga's main rivals include Lillestrøm, Ham Kam, Kongsvinger, Brann and Lyn. Since the 90s, the main supporter club has actively worked hard for social issues and against hooliganism. Despite this, as recently as 2019, isolated individuals within the club's support have engaged in disruptive and dangerous activities during live matches.


title: Vålerenga Fotball

text: In the 2014 season, Vålerenga gathered an average attendance of 9,756 at their home matches, ranking them fourth in Norway with regard to attendance.


title: H.R. College of Commerce and Economics

text: Hassaram Rijhumal College of Commerce and Economics, commonly known as HR College, is an autonomous (since 2007 ) educational institute located in Churchgate, Mumbai. It is run by the Hyderabad (Sindh) National Collegiate Board and is affiliated to the HSNC University.


title: H.R. College of Commerce and Economics

text: It was the second college in Maharashtra (after KC College, Churchgate) to be accredited ‘A’ grade with a score of 87.95% by the NAAC (National Assessment & Accreditation Council) under the revised scheme in 2002.


title: H.R. College of Commerce and Economics

text: It is located adjacent to Kishinchand Chellaram College and shares a building with the KC Law College.


title: H.R. College of Commerce and Economics

text: Dr. Indu Shahani, a noted academic and former Sheriff of Mumbai, is a former principal of HR College.


title: H.R. College of Commerce and Economics

text: The courses offered by the institute can be broadly classified into two categories; Junior college degrees & Senior college degrees.


title: H.R. College of Commerce and Economics

text: Junior college degrees includes 11th grade (FYJC) & 12th grade (SYJC) courses. For this, it is affiliated to Maharashtra State education board. This includes the High School passing certificate (Class 12 certificate).


title: H.R. College of Commerce and Economics

text: Senior college degrees offered by the institute include courses such as B.COM, BMS, BAF , BBI , BFM , BAMMC, and BVoc(Retail Management) , BVoc(Wealth Management) and BVoc(Tourism and Hospitality Management). For this, it is affiliated to the HSNC University.


title: H.R. College of Commerce and Economics

text: In 2019, it was announced that HR College will be part of the second cluster university in Mumbai called HSNC Cluster University. This cluster university would also include (and be led by) KC College. They were officially supposed to become part of the cluster university from academic year 2020-21.


title: Shadow banking system

text: The shadow banking system is a term for the collection of non-bank financial intermediaries (NBFIs) that provide services similar to traditional commercial banks but outside normal banking regulations. Examples of NBFIs include hedge funds, insurance firms, pawn shops, cashier's check issuers, check cashing locations, payday lending, currency exchanges, and microloan organizations. The phrase "shadow banking" is regarded by some as pejorative, and the term "market-based finance" has been proposed as an alternative.


title: Shadow banking system

text: Shadow banking has grown in importance to rival traditional depository banking, and was a factor in the subprime mortgage crisis of 2007–2008 and the global recession that followed.


title: Shadow banking system

text: Paul McCulley of investment management firm PIMCO coined the term "shadow banking". Shadow banking is sometimes said to include entities such as hedge funds, money market funds, structured investment vehicles (SIV), "credit investment funds, exchange-traded funds, credit hedge funds, private equity funds, securities broker-dealers, credit insurance providers, securitization and finance companies." Still, the meaning and scope of shadow banking are disputed in academic literature.


title: Shadow banking system

text: According to Hervé Hannoun, deputy general manager of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), investment banks and commercial banks may conduct much of their business in the shadow banking system (SBS) although most are not classified as SBS institutions themselves. At least one financial regulatory expert has said that regulated banking organizations are the largest shadow banks.


title: Shadow banking system

text: The core activities of investment banks are subject to regulation and monitoring by central banks and other government institutions – but it has been common practice for investment banks to conduct many of their transactions in ways that do not show up on their conventional balance sheet accounting and so are not visible to regulators or unsophisticated investors. For example, before the 2007–2012 financial crisis, investment banks financed mortgages through off-balance sheet (OBS) securitizations (e.g., asset-backed commercial paper programs) and hedged risk through off-balance sheet credit default swaps. Before the 2008 financial crisis, major investment banks were subject to considerably less stringent regulation than depository banks. In 2008, investment banks Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs became bank holding companies, Merrill Lynch and Bear Stearns were acquired by bank holding companies, and Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy, essentially bringing the largest investment banks into the regulated depository sphere.


title: Shadow banking system

text: The volume of transactions in the shadow banking system grew dramatically after the year 2000. Its growth was checked by the 2008 crisis and for a short while it declined in size, both in the US and in the rest of the world.


title: Shadow banking system

text: In 2007 the Financial Stability Board estimated the size of the SBS in the U.S. to be around $25 trillion, but by 2011 estimates indicated a decrease to $24 trillion. Globally, a study of the 11 largest national shadow banking systems found that they totaled $50 trillion in 2007, fell to $47 trillion in 2008, but by late 2011 had climbed to $51 trillion, just over their estimated size before the crisis. Overall, the worldwide SBS totaled about $60 trillion as of late 2011. In November 2012 Bloomberg reported in a Financial Stability Board report an increase of the SBS to about $67 trillion. It is unclear to what extent various measures of the shadow banking system include activities of regulated banks, such as bank borrowing in the repo market and the issuance of bank-sponsored asset-backed commercial paper. Banks by far are the largest issuers of commercial paper in the United States, for example.


title: Shadow banking system

text: , academic research has suggested that the true size of the shadow banking system may have been over $100 trillion in 2012. According to the Financial Stability Board the sectors size grew to 100 trillion in 2016.


title: Shadow banking system

text: Shadow institutions typically do not have banking licenses; they do not take deposits as a depository bank would and therefore are not subject to the same regulations. Complex legal entities comprising the system include hedge funds, structured investment vehicles (SIV), special purpose entity conduits (SPE), money market funds, repurchase agreement (repo) markets and other non-bank financial institutions. Many shadow banking entities are sponsored by banks or are affiliated with banks through their subsidiaries or parent bank holding companies. The inclusion of money market funds in the definition of shadow banking has been questioned in view of their relatively simple structure and the highly regulated and unleveraged nature of these entities, which are considered safer, more liquid, and more transparent than banks.


title: Shadow banking system

text: Shadow banking institutions are typically intermediaries between investors and borrowers. For example, an institutional investor like a pension fund may be willing to lend money, while a corporation may be searching for funds to borrow. The shadow banking institution will channel funds from the investor(s) to the corporation, profiting either from fees or from the difference in interest rates between what it pays the investor(s) and what it receives from the borrower.


title: Shadow banking system

text: Hervé Hannoun, Deputy General Manager of the Bank for International Settlements described the structure of this shadow banking system at the annual South East Asian Central Banks (SEACEN) conference.


title: Shadow banking system

text: This sector was worth an estimated $60 trillion in 2010, compared to prior FSB estimates of $27 trillion in 2002. While the sector's assets declined during the global financial crisis, they have since returned to their pre-crisis peak except in the United States where they have declined substantially.


title: Shadow banking system

text: A 2013 paper by Fiaschi "et al." used a statistical analysis based on the deviation from the Zipf distribution of the sizes of the world's largest financial entities to infer that the size of the shadow banking system may have been over $100 trillion in 2012.


title: Shadow banking system

text: There are concerns that more business may move into the shadow banking system as regulators seek to bolster the financial system by making bank rules stricter.


title: Shadow banking system

text: Like regular banks, shadow banks provide credit and generally increase the liquidity of the financial sector. Yet unlike their more regulated competitors, they lack access to central bank funding or safety nets such as deposit insurance and debt guarantees. In contrast to traditional banks, shadow banks do not take deposits. Instead, they rely on short-term funding provided either by asset-backed commercial paper or by the repo market, in which borrowers in substance offer collateral as security against a cash loan, through the mechanism of selling the security to a lender and agreeing to repurchase it at an agreed time in the future for an agreed price. Money market funds do not rely on short-term funding; rather, they are investment pools that provide short-term funding by investing in short-term debt instruments issued by banks, corporations, state and local governments, and other borrowers. The shadow banking sector operates across the American, European, and Chinese financial sectors, and in perceived tax havens worldwide. Shadow banks can be involved in the provision of long-term loans like mortgages, facilitating credit across the financial system by matching investors and borrowers individually or by becoming part of a chain involving numerous entities, some of which may be mainstream banks. Due in part to their specialized structure, shadow banks can sometimes provide credit more cost-efficiently than traditional banks. A headline study by the International Monetary Fund defines the two key functions of the shadow banking system as securitization – to create safe assets, and collateral intermediation – to help reduce counterparty risks and facilitate secured transactions. In the US, before the 2008 financial crisis, the shadow banking system had overtaken the regular banking system in supplying loans to various types of borrower; including businesses, home and car buyers, students and credit users. As they are often less risk averse than regular banks, entities from the shadow banking system will sometimes provide loans to borrowers who might otherwise be refused credit. Money market funds are considered more risk averse than regular banks and thus lack this risk characteristic.


title: Shadow banking system

text: Leverage (the means by which banks multiply and spread risk) is considered to be a key risk feature of shadow banks, as well as traditional banks. Money market funds are completely unleveraged and thus do not have this risk characteristic.


title: Shadow banking system

text: The recommendations for G20 leaders on regulating shadow banks were due to be finalised by the end of 2012. The United States and the European Union are already considering rules to increase regulation of areas like securitisation and money market funds, although the need for money market fund reforms has been questioned in the United States in light of reforms adopted by the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2010. The International Monetary Fund suggested that the two policy priorities should be to reduce spillovers from the shadow banking system to the main banking system and to reduce procyclicality and systemic risk within the shadow banking system itself.


title: Shadow banking system

text: The G20 leaders meeting in Russia in September 2013, will endorse the new Financial Stability Board (FSB) global regulations for the shadow banking systems which will come into effect by 2015.


title: Shadow banking system

text: Many "shadow bank"-like institutions and vehicles have emerged in American and European markets, between the years 2000 and 2008, and have come to play an important role in providing credit across the global financial system.


title: Shadow banking system

text: In a June 2008 speech, Timothy Geithner, then president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, described the growing importance of what he called the "non-bank financial system": "In early 2007, asset-backed commercial paper conduits, in structured investment vehicles, in auction-rate preferred securities, tender option bonds and variable rate demand notes, had a combined asset size of roughly $2.2 trillion. Assets financed overnight in triparty repo grew to $2.5 trillion. Assets held in hedge funds grew to roughly $1.8 trillion. The combined balance sheets of the then five major investment banks totaled $4 trillion. In comparison, the total assets of the top five bank holding companies in the United States at that point were just over $6 trillion, and total assets of the entire banking system were about $10 trillion."


title: Shadow banking system

text: In 2016, Benoît Cœuré (ECB executive board member) stated that controlling shadow banking should be the focus to avoid a future financial crisis, since the banks' leverage had been lowered.


title: Shadow banking system

text: Shadow institutions are not subject to the same prudential regulations as depository banks, so that they do not have to keep as high financial reserves relative to their market exposure. Thus they can have a very high level of financial leverage, with a high ratio of debt relative to the liquid assets available to pay immediate claims. High leverage magnifies profits during boom periods and losses during downturns. This high leverage will also not be readily apparent to investors, and shadow institutions may therefore be able to create the appearance of superior performance during boom times by simply taking greater pro-cyclical risks. Money market funds have zero leverage and thus do not pose this risk feature of shadow banks.


title: Shadow banking system

text: Shadow institutions like "SIVs" and "conduits", typically sponsored and guaranteed by commercial banks, borrowed from investors in short-term, liquid markets (such as the money market and commercial paper markets), so that they would have to repay and borrow again from these investors at frequent intervals. On the other hand, they used the funds to lend to corporations or to invest in longer-term, less liquid (i.e. harder to sell) assets. In many cases, the long-term assets purchased were mortgage-backed securities, sometimes called "toxic assets" or "legacy assets" in the press. These assets declined significantly in value as housing prices declined and foreclosures increased during 2007–2009.


title: Shadow banking system

text: In the case of investment banks, this reliance on short-term financing required them to return frequently to investors in the capital markets to refinance their operations. When the housing market began to deteriorate and their ability to obtain funds from investors through investments such as mortgage-backed securities declined, these investment banks could not refinance themselves. Investor refusal or inability to provide funds via the short-term markets was a primary cause of the failure of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers during 2008.


title: Shadow banking system

text: From a technical standpoint, these institutions are subject to market risk, credit risk and especially liquidity risk, since their liabilities are short term while their assets are more long term and illiquid. This creates a problem, as they are not depositary institutions and do not have direct or indirect access to the support of their central bank in its role as lender of last resort. Therefore, during periods of market illiquidity, they could go bankrupt if unable to refinance their short-term liabilities. They were also highly leveraged. This meant that disruptions in credit markets would make them subject to rapid deleveraging, meaning they would have to pay off their debts by selling their long-term assets. A sell off of assets could cause further price declines of those assets and further losses and selloffs. In contrast to investment banks, money market funds do not go bankrupt—they distribute their assets (which are mainly short-term) pro rata to shareholders if their net asset value falls below $.9995 per share. Only two funds ever have failed to pay investors $1.00 per share. The Reserve Primary Fund paid $.99 per share to its shareholders and another fund paid its shareholders $.96 per share in 1994.


title: Shadow banking system

text: The securitization markets frequently tapped by the shadow banking system started to close down in the spring of 2007, with the first failure of auction-rate offerings to attract bids. As excesses associated with the U.S. housing bubble became widely understood and borrower default rates rose, residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS) deflated. Tranched collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) lost value as default rates increased beyond the levels projected by their associated agency credit ratings. Commercial mortgage-backed securities suffered from association and from a general decline in economic activity, and the entire complex nearly shut down in the fall of 2008. More than a third of the private credit markets thus became unavailable as a source of funds. In February 2009, Ben Bernanke stated that securitization markets remained effectively shut, with the exception of conforming mortgages, which could be sold to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.


title: Shadow banking system

text: U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has stated that the "combined effect of these factors was a financial system vulnerable to self-reinforcing asset price and credit cycles."


title: Shadow banking system

text: In January 2012, the global Financial Stability Board announced its intention to further regulate the shadow banking system, in the interests of the real economy.


title: Shadow banking system

text: The term "shadow banking system" is attributed to Paul McCulley of PIMCO, who coined it at Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City's Economic Symposium in Jackson Hole, Wyoming in 2007 where he defined it as "the whole alphabet soup of levered up non-bank investment conduits, vehicles, and structures." McCulley identified the birth of the shadow banking system with the development of money market funds in the 1970s – money market accounts function largely as bank deposits, but money market funds are not regulated as banks.


title: Shadow banking system

text: The concept of hidden high priority debt dates back at least 400 years to "Twyne's Case" and the Statute of Bankrupts (1542) in the UK, and to "Clow v. Woods" in the U.S. These legal cases led to the development of modern fraudulent transfer law.


title: Shadow banking system

text: The concept of credit growth by unregulated institutions, though not the term "shadow banking system", dates at least to 1935, when Friedrich Hayek stated:


title: Shadow banking system

text: The full extent of the shadow banking system was not widely recognised until work was published in 2010 by Manmohan Singh and James Aitken of the International Monetary Fund, showing that when the role of rehypothecation was considered, in the U.S. the SBS had grown to over $10 trillion, about twice as much as previous estimates.


title: Shadow banking system

text: During 1998, the highly leveraged and unregulated hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management failed and was bailed out by several major banks at the request of the government, which was concerned about possible damage to the broader financial system.


title: Shadow banking system

text: Structured investment vehicles (SIVs) first came to public attention at the time of the Enron scandal. Since then, their use has become widespread in the financial world. In the years leading up to the crisis, the top four U.S. depository banks moved an estimated $5.2 trillion in assets and liabilities off their balance sheets into special purpose vehicles (SPEs) or similar entities. This enabled them to bypass regulatory requirements for minimum capital adequacy ratios, thereby increasing leverage and profits during the boom but increasing losses during the crisis. New accounting guidance was planned to require them to put some of these assets back onto their books during 2009, with the effect of reducing their capital ratios. One news agency estimated the amount of assets to be transferred at between $500 billion and $1 trillion. This transfer was considered as part of the stress tests performed by the government during 2009.


title: Shadow banking system

text: The shadow banking system also conducts an enormous amount of trading activity in the over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives market, which grew rapidly in the decade up to the 2008 financial crisis, reaching over US$650 trillion in notional contracts traded. This rapid growth mainly arose from credit derivatives. In particular these included:


title: Shadow banking system

text: The market in CDS, for example, was insignificant in 2004 but rose to over $60 trillion in a few years. Because credit default swaps were not regulated as insurance contracts, companies selling them were not required to maintain sufficient capital reserves to pay potential claims. Demands for settlement of hundreds of billions of dollars of credit default swaps contracts issued by AIG, the largest insurance company in the world, led to its financial collapse. Despite the prevalence and volume of this activity, it attracted little outside attention before 2007, and much of it was off the balance sheets of the contracting parties' affiliated banks. The uncertainty this created among counterparties contributed to the deterioration of credit conditions.


title: Shadow banking system

text: Since then the shadow banking system has been blamed for aggravating the subprime mortgage crisis and helping to transform it into a global credit crunch.


title: Shadow banking system

text: The shadow banking system has been implicated as significantly contributing to the global financial crisis of 2007–2012. In a June 2008 speech, U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, then President and CEO of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, placed significant blame for the freezing of credit markets on a "run" on the entities in the shadow banking system by their counterparties. The rapid increase of the dependency of bank and non-bank financial institutions on the use of these off-balance sheet entities to fund investment strategies had made them critical to the credit markets underpinning the financial system as a whole, despite their existence in the shadows, outside of the regulatory controls governing commercial banking activity. Furthermore, these entities were vulnerable because they borrowed short-term in liquid markets to purchase long-term, illiquid and risky assets. This meant that disruptions in credit markets would make them subject to rapid deleveraging, selling their long-term assets at depressed prices.


title: Shadow banking system

text: Economist Paul Krugman described the run on the shadow banking system as the "core of what happened" to cause the crisis. "As the shadow banking system expanded to rival or even surpass conventional banking in importance, politicians and government officials should have realized that they were re-creating the kind of financial vulnerability that made the Great Depression possible—and they should have responded by extending regulations and the financial safety net to cover these new institutions. Influential figures should have proclaimed a simple rule: anything that does what a bank does, anything that has to be rescued in crises the way banks are, should be regulated like a bank." He referred to this lack of controls as "malign neglect."


title: Shadow banking system

text: One former banking regulator has said that regulated banking organizations are the largest shadow banks and that shadow banking activities within the regulated banking system were responsible for the severity of the financial crisis.


title: Taif

text: Taif (, ) is a city and governorate in the Makkan Region of Saudi Arabia. Located at an elevation of in the slopes of the Hijaz Mountains, which themselves are part of the Sarat Mountains, the city has a 2020 estimated population of 688,693 people, making it the 6th most populous city in the kingdom.


title: Taif

text: There is a belief that Taif is indirectly referred to in . The city was visited by the Islamic prophet Muhammad, sometime in the early 7th century, and was inhabited by the tribe of Banu Thaqif. It is still inhabited to this day by their descendants. As a part of the Hejaz, the city has seen many transfers-of-power throughout its history, with the last being during the Saudi conquest of Hejaz in 1925.


title: Taif

text: The city has been called the unofficial summer capital of Saudi Arabia and has also been called the best summer destination in Saudi Arabia as it enjoys a moderate weather during summer, unlike most of the Arabian Peninsula. The city owes its popularity among tourists to its many mountain resorts and moderate climate, even during the harsh summers of Arabia. The city is connected to the nearby resort town of Al-Hada via the iconic Highway 15 (Taif – Al-Hada Road). It stands out from the rest of the Hijazi region as it is a city that plays an active role in the agricultural output of Saudi Arabia and is the center of an agricultural area known for its cultivation of grapes, pomegranate, figs, roses and honey. Taif is also very active in the manufacturing of traditional 'Ittar, and is known locally as "City of the Roses" (). Taif also hosts the historic Souq 'Okaz.


title: Taif

text: The Taif governorate is divided into 15 smaller municipalities, with Ta'if as the capital. The administration of the city itself is carried out by 5 municipalities, named North Taif, West Taif, East Taif, South Taif and New Taif. Taif is served by the Taif Regional Airport, with a new international airport planned to open sometime in 2020.


title: Taif

text: Much like many of the cities in the Hejazi region, the city of Ta'if had an older name: "Wajj" (). This was also the name of the , a significant valley within Arabian and Islamic history.


title: Taif

text: The etymology of the city's current name, Taʾif (), comes from the Arabic root , which could translate to "wanderer", "roamer", or "circulator"; the latter of which is the basis of the word "Ṭawāf" (), which literally translates to "circulation" or "circumambulation", and is used in the context of the circumambulation of the Kaaba.


title: Taif

text: Taʾif was given this name due to the wall that was built by the tribe of Banu Thaqif that circulated the city. In short, the city of Taʾif literally means the circulated or encircled city.