St Louis's problem is the reputation of East St Louis.
If we just focus on East St Louis...
The interstates caused property values to tank. Dropping tax income caused budget cuts, driving the fire department to go on strike.
Dissatisfied with the police and fire situation, many large employers petitioned the state to let them secede from the city and negotiate police and fire services directly from St Clair County, further deepening the city's tax problems, causing maintenance deferral to spread into basic infrastructure maintenance.
.........
When Warmachine Mk 3 dropped, it became apparent that they'd done very little playtesting and that it was structured around rigid forcecomps clearly intended to sell more material.
As feedback started to roll in, they fired their entire community support team, and then pulled all convention appearances.
Then they started direct selling figures lootbox style at a discount, which swamped eBay with product below msrp, infuriating store owners.
Ehhh...
The most amazing transition for local game & comic store was in 2017, the year Privateer Press decided to shoot itself in the foot and go from commanding multiple whole shelves for warmahordes to being unceremoniously dumped in the discount bin.
I think things start to get interesting though if the regulator can't raise enough money from the sale of SVB's assets to offset the deposits.
The Fed can cheat on that by taking the bank's held-to-maturity securities onto its own balance sheet. It's a bailout "in the present" but will pay itself off because the Treasury never defaults.
But that doesn't have the same potential to launch the problem into other sectors of the economy.
Agriculture, manufacturing, communications, health care, logistics, technology, and entertainment didn't care about the bankruptcies and defaults. Banks collapsing left and right was just a problem for borrowers, not businesses funded by selling equities. They barely even cared as the rating agencies like Bear Sterns imploded.
But once AIG collapsed, THEN the threat became real for the rest of the economy.
In 2008 there was a force multiplier:
Insurance companies investing their reserves in improperly rated mortgage backed securities.
When foreclosures started to ramp up, nobody knew how much the investments were actually worth, so suddenly insurance companies were seeing their reserve money evaporate instantly.
The figure you're complaining about is called "Expense Ratio".
For life insurance, the industry average expense ratio is about 10.5%. For property casualty, it's about 27%.
Health Insurance uses a reversed figure called Medical Cost Ratio, which is legally required to be at least 80%-85% (depending on some criteria). This is because unlike Life and P&C, health insurance is basically always a money losing venture.
Those Hicksites and their progressive heresy...
Someone ought to write a strongly worded letter.
but I think they should look more "princely" or something
As I mentioned earlier, Cure Chocolat is more butch than Cure Wing.
As in quite literally the character is modeled on a Takarazuka Revue style otokoyaku (lit: "male role", although played by a woman), and the VA did that for 15 stage productions IRL before moving into voice work.
going back to that deal is going to be impossible
Not impossible. It will simply require total capitulation, which women aren't going to offer.
As in the original three. It was a Dark Horse title. Back around the time the original movies were re-released in theaters before Phantom Menace.
Each movie was done by a different artist though, so the styles diverge.
In terms of raw collectability, I'd say the ToysPress english run of Mamoru Nagano's The Five Star Stories is probably the most difficult manga set to complete. And it itself is incomplete, cutting off several volumes short of the JP printing.
Some other items that come to mind:
The last volume (10) of the 2009 english printing of Kaoru Mori's Emma is also quite rare, selling for a couple hundred dollars.
Complete sets of the 2004 english printing of Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind are getting hard to find.
That was before the Chinese bought them off.
A party that claims to indifferent or opposed to nationalism is now either malicious or dangerously incompetent.