Word: crudely
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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...
Have lunch on the back patio of Fiesta Villa on Main Avenue and watch the railroad cars packed with coal go by - and by and by - and you'll start to understand why. Last year was a great one for energy and agriculture: corn, crude oil, coal and wheat are major state exports. The boom helped push energy outfit MDU Resources onto the Fortune 500 (the first North Dakota firm to make the list) and the state budget to a $1.2 billion surplus. State workers around the country are being told to sit at home without pay to trim costs...
...regulation--regulators are likely to mess up, so why bother? But it can also point toward an approach based not so much on discretion as on rules, the simpler the better. I first encountered this argument last fall in the work of left-leaning blogger Matthew Yglesias--he advocated "crude measures" like the old ban on interstate banking. Lately, though, I've been hearing similar suggestions from those of a conservative, University of Chicago bent. "When you give a lot of discretion to regulators, they don't use the tools that are given to them," Chicago economist Gary Becker said...
...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...
That skepticism seemed fair based on early attempts. In 1884, a German inventor created crude moving images by filtering light through a spinning disk punched with holes. In the early 1920s, engineers in the U.S. and U.K. sent still pictures and moving silhouettes using radio waves. In 1928, General Electric broadcast the first TV drama: a modified small spinning disk and bright lamp produced off-center, blurry pictures of cigarette-toting actors gallivanting around what was supposed to be Europe (but was actually Schenectady, N.Y.). It was one of the best offerings at the time. Other must-see TV included...