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Yesterday I listened to an interview on National Public Radio with David Kaplan, editorial director of an organization called the Center for Public Integrity, which has just come out with a report on the illegal trade in tobacco which, according to Mr. Kaplan, is the world’s most-smuggled legal product.
It’s a fascinating story of a trade worth as much as $100 billion annually – representing an estimated 12 percent of total cigarette sales – with a global reach and organizational sophistication worthy of any multinational corporation or illegal drug cartel. [click to continue…]
Tagged as:
cigarette smuggling,
cigarette tax,
cigarettes,
drug prohibition,
Hell's Angels,
Hezbollah,
Indian reservation,
Taliban,
tax,
terrorism,
tobacco
Here is a comment (the second one I have posted) in a LinkedIn forum on the global economic crisis, in which various serious and fanciful proposals for replacing the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency have been discussed. “What Will Replace the U.S. Dollar?”
Carbon emissions credits or kilowatt hours are a poor medium of exchange for the same reason that cigarettes or rare wines or tulip bulbs or even barrels of oil are: they are unstable and they have utility apart from their value as units of account. Until we have batteries capable of storing all the electricity generated and a much more efficient electric grid, a kilowatt hour produced but not consumed is lost forever. You can’t save it and use or spend it tomorrow. And because of transmission loss, a kilowatt hour generated in California is something less than a kilowatt hour when it reaches New Jersey. [click to continue…]
Tagged as:
carbon credits,
cigarettes,
Crisis,
electricity,
energy,
Germany,
gold standard,
inflation,
reserve currency,
silver,
store of value,
U.S. dollar,
Zimbabwe
