Word: crude
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...responded as if it were an oil product," says Coast Guard Petty Officer Terry Hasenauer. "It was described to us as an oil-like substance, thick and lingering below the surface of the water. Those characteristics can indicate heavy, degraded oil, maybe crude oil or possibly an intermediate fuel oil." Meanwhile, the story spread over the Internet like an oil spill, giving lots of people a queasy feeling. (Read about the coming battle for the resources of the Arctic...
...still. If the government decides to curb trading in the oil-futures market, it would limit trading by purely financial speculators. Instead, the government should focus on trade activity by oil companies, oil suppliers and oil hedgers like airlines. Yes, you read correctly: oil traders with physical ties to crude represent the greatest threat for another price hike...
...through its energy-trading desk. Banks are most likely playing a key role in the current run by putting the bailout money to good use: to continue the bid for oil. Again, just a fraction of the bailout is enough to corner the market and rig the price of crude - not that any of these players would dare...
Then there's the nature of the attacks: crude and essentially harmless. Cyberexperts call them denial-of-service (DOS) attacks, because they do no more harm than slow down or temporarily shut down networks. No sensitive government network was affected: the hackers (or lone hacker, since this could easily be the work of one person) only went after unrestricted, so-called public-facing sites. The assumption among some cyberexperts is that such unsophisticated attacks must come from an unsophisticated source...
...Chicago Law School professor Richard Posner's new book, A Failure of Capitalism, is another. In it, Posner fingers financial deregulation as a major cause of the crisis. He's less clear about what we ought to do now, although one of his suggestions very much fits the crude-measure standard: we should consider raising income taxes on high earners "in order to reduce their appetite for risk-taking...