It acts as a safety-valve for a country that has an unemployment rate of 20% and no welfare provision.

ECONOMIST: Morocco

They do not have the safety-valve of banking books, where souring assets can escape the rigours of mark-to-market accounting.

ECONOMIST: Investment banking: Is there a future? | The

The second alleged justification is political: that anti-dumping is a safety-valve for countries that are otherwise opening up their markets.

ECONOMIST: Unfair protection | The

The Kremlin has tolerated Ekho Moskvy as a safety-valve for the discontented intelligentsia, and also as a useful tool to refute Western criticism of lack of freedom of speech.

ECONOMIST: The media in Russia

No matter: rather than worrying about whether humour was ultimately a safety-valve for communism or subversive of it, the reader can skip ruthlessly and concentrate on the jokes, and the remarks people have made about them.

ECONOMIST: Communist jokes

In the euro's first decade, southern Mediterranean countries enjoyed the benefit of lower interest rates, but they failed to reform their labour and product markets to make their economies more competitive for a world in which they had lost the safety-valve of currency devaluation.

ECONOMIST: Europe and the euro

Or perhaps, since the clever stuff can go wrong, ballot-stuffing is a safety valve.

ECONOMIST: Election fraud

This is all the more extraordinary insofar as many Americans have recently learned to their horror about such "friends'" thoroughly immoderate, but longstanding, practice of using virulent anti-Israeli and anti-American propaganda as a sort of social safety valve.

CENTERFORSECURITYPOLICY: Getting History -- and the Future -- Right