Word: traded
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...need more - not fewer - oil traders. After a roller-coaster ride that has sent oil prices from a record high of $147 per bbl. last July to below $35 in December and back to around $60, there has been a clamor to clamp down on speculators - those investors who trade oil but don't ultimately supply it or use it (the way airlines do, for instance). The economic disruption caused by oil's volatility has been so vexing that the Obama Administration believes it can stabilize prices by regulating speculators out of the market...
...Currently, with virtually no regulation, the oil-futures market - given that it drives the price of oil worldwide - is very small. Dangerously small. To limit trading would make it smaller 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...
...futures market is tiny compared with the physical oil market: less than 3% of the world's oil consumption over the next year is accounted for in the open interest - the contracts currently being traded - at the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX). To put it in perspective, Saudi Arabia alone produces four times that much oil. Consider the leverage that the futures market allows - you can trade more than 10 times your money in oil - and suddenly every dollar you put into the futures market controls well over $300 worth of oil. We can put a price...
...change in tactics and command (McChrystal was brought in to replace Army General David McKiernan, who had led ISAF since June 2008) was necessitated by a grim truth. The war in Afghanistan is not going well. The Taliban, funded in large measure by the opium trade, which is centered in Helmand, now controls wide swaths of Afghanistan. Over the past four months, a recent U.N. report says, the number of "assassinations, abductions, incidents of intimidation and the direct targeting of aid workers" has been higher than last year. Increasing numbers of foreign fighters - "most likely affiliated with al-Qaeda...
Terrorism and the illicit drug trade have flourished in Afghanistan because the lack of a functioning economy has let warlords fill the vacuum. That needs to change. The U.S. recently announced, for example, that it is shifting its antipoppy efforts from destroying the opium-producing flowers to encouraging different crops. But that's quite a challenge: poppies are easy to grow and net four times as much money per acre as wheat. So farmers will need new cash crops to replace the poppies and newly built roads to get such goods to market without paying bribes along...