Word: cartelizing
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...must be said, however, that Mann the writer is perhaps a little too taken with detail. Basically, his undercover-cop duo (Jamie Foxx and Colin Farrell) are pretending to be high-level, freelance drug smugglers making a deal with a Hispanic cartel that does not think small, and in the first part of his film Mann dawdles them through a labyrinth that's not conventionally menacing. Foxx and Farrell don't have a lot to do in those passages, which permits us to spend plenty of time with Li, who plays the criminal gang's enigmatic financial whiz, and that...
...Cartel The address is 17 Charterhouse Street. Ten times every year, near the open-air stalls of Smithfield Market in central London, about 80 of the diamond world's most powerful men meet here. Each client is led into a second-floor room. Coffee and tea are offered. An attendant comes back with what looks like a yellow-and-black plastic lunchbox. Inside are gem diamonds of all varying types and sizes. There are no negotiations over price, only an implied choice: Take it or leave it. These events are called "sights," and the host is De Beers Consolidated Mines...
...went back to Moscow, offering the transitional government $1 billion in exchange for part of the nation's stockpile of Siberian diamonds. Diamonds were a $40 billion retail business by the 1990s. Only one thing could threaten its position-a large supply of stones outside the grasp of the cartel...
...Like every other new diamond mine of consequence, it was co-opted by De Beers. Trouble erupted almost immediately. The cartel's directors started telling Argyle to stockpile a good portion of its diamonds to counterbalance a wave of smuggled stones coming in from the Angolan civil war. The agreed price per carat also dropped from $12 to around $9 in the first year of the partnership. By 1996 the Australians had had enough. Argyle would try to sell directly to Indian manufacturers through a Bombay office. The cartel tried a power play: it dumped $400 million of cheap rough...
...Japan The Japanese had no need for diamonds. The engagement ring had no place in their historical notion of romance. No rings were ever exchanged. But in the mid-1960s, the De Beers cartel looked at Japan and saw potential. The J. Walter Thompson advertising agency was hired to flood the Japanese media with advertising touting the rings as a symbol of Western sexuality and prosperity. In 1966 less than 1% of Japanese women received a diamond ring when they married. By 1981 that figure had rocketed to 60%. And after another decade of sustained advertising, close...