In the meantime, the O.P.C.W. called on commercial companies to submit proposals by Friday for the destruction of several hundred metric tons of less dangerous "bulk commodity chemicals" that were acquired for the weapons program.
Yet while content — a commodity to be acquired, distributed, and leveraged — remains a fiction in the minds of business planners, digital technology has given marketers enormous opportunities to publish and produce.
Customers are not commodities that can be acquired or disposed of at will.
One of their worries, it appears, was that the phonograph record, as a physical object, made music a "thing" - a purchasable commodity that could be acquired by crude or philistine people for other than purely esthetic reasons.
Demand for mobile services, devices, and applications is expanding so quickly that the industry is in real danger of running out of the one commodity that can't easily be acquired: radio spectrum.
Mr. Vereker gained a deal-making reputation by advising natural resource companies like Xstrata, which is being acquired by the commodities trader Glencore International in a $30 billion deal.
The owner of the venerable New York Stock Exchange is in talks to be acquired by an upstart commodities and derivatives trading platform, according to people briefed on the matter.
That asset, too, was acquired by Shamalov from Timchenko, a commodities trader who has known the president since the 1990s.
YouTube was acquired, Android was acquired.
Commodities were especially jumpy.
Commodities were ripe for a correction.
