How It's Used

In an essay on why Lehman Brothers wasn’t receiving a government bailout:  “So, if your company is in trouble, what should you do? Double down. Establish links to other firms. Export your products with abandon. And hustle. There are only seven more weeks until the election.”—Daniel Gross, “Lemons, But No Lehman Aid,” Slate, September 12, 2008.“As a result, when the inevitable crash finally came, it wasn't only those unsuspecting foreigners who bought those leveraged loans and asset-backed securities who wound up taking the hit. It was also their creators -- Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, Citigroup, Lehman Brothers, AIG and others -- who made the mistake of doubling-down on their credit risk at the very moment they should have been cutting back.”—Steven Pearlstein, “Scrambling to Clean Up After a Category 4 Financial Storm,” The Washington Post, September 18, 2008, p. A01."The Hondurans I met agree. All everyone seemed to want was a chance to make their case, or at least an independent review of the facts. "So far, the Obama administration has ignored these requests and instead has repeatedly doubled down. It's revoked the U.S. travel visas of President Micheletti, his government and private citizens, and refuses to talk to the government in Tegucigalpa. It's frozen desperately needed financial assistance to one of the poorest and friendliest U.S. allies in the region. It won't release the legal basis for its insistence on Mr. Zelaya's restoration to power. Nor has it explained why it's setting aside America's longstanding policy of supporting free elections to settle these kinds of disputes."—Jim DeMint, "What I Heard in Honduras: Our ambassador is the only person I met there who thinks there was a 'coup.' Let's release the State Department legal analysis," The Wall Street Journal, October 10, 2009."The oil and gas business is full of gamblers who drill deep and often, praying for gushers but frequently ending up with dry holes. Then there is Richard D. Kinder, chief executive of Kinder Morgan, who has personally made billions of dollars operating the industry’s equivalent of a toll road: pipelines. "Now, with Kinder Morgan’s $21 billion deal to buy a leading rival, the El Paso Corporation, he is doubling down. Hydraulic fracturing techniques—despite causing a growing controversy—are creating a once-in-a-generation boom in oil and gas drilling in the United States, and the opportunity to build many more pipelines to carry new supplies to market."—Clifford Krauss, "Kinder's Major Bet on a Boom in Fracking," The New York Times, December 15, 2011.

Links

Beyond eAlmanac
Wikipedia article on Double Down