Word: bigs
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...forced to sell at a lower price - or risk losing more than you can afford. As the price falls, and all of the other "smart" traders around you are forced to unwind their long positions and sell oil, the price will fall even faster against you. Why would the big boys do this to you? Well, any money lost by one trader must be gained by another. If they can make you take a loss, it ultimately translates to their gain...
...going to fare very well. It's the old gambler's-ruin problem: you can only lose so much and you're not likely to keep making money indefinitely, so you're going to get wiped out eventually. But some players are big enough to triumph. They have low trading fees and get the best prices on their trades. They're the ones definitively moving prices. It's not the small speculators that we should be worried about. It's the larger speculators, like the investment banks. Because they don't even have to worry about getting wiped out - they...
After a pilot project last year proved a big hit with the public, Dörentrup council has decided to roll out the scheme for the entire village (pop. 9,000). Utility company Lemgo estimates it will cut Dörentrup's carbon emissions by some 12 tons each year compared with leaving the streetlights on all night. "We found out that on each stretch of road, people only switch on the lights up to three times each night," explains Frank Bräuer, project leader at Lemgo. "That's why this system works in villages or on the outskirts...
...Little Big China Those caveats are important. But China's technocrats are well aware of the risks they are running. "They came into this [crisis period] with eyes wide open," says Barber, recognizing that loans being granted in a relatively weak economic climate could start to go bad in droves. The country's once shaky financial sector was cleaned up several years ago - in 2007, nonperforming loans amounted to just 3% of total bank assets - and vehicles set up to deal with China's last banking crisis still exist. In other words, Beijing thinks its financial system is strong enough...
...China can help. But it remains a relatively poor country, with an annual per capita income of $6,000, compared with $39,000 in the U.S. and $33,400 in the E.U. To be solidly middle class in China's big cities is to have an income of about $12,000. Brisk though auto sales may be, most Chinese still can't afford a Volkswagen or a Buick, let alone a BMW. Even as China's consumers feel richer, their share of its economy may not change much until Beijing enacts reforms to the health-care and social-security systems...