Cheap oil, cheap trucking, cheap shipping, and cheap flying exploded old production methods, sending industry from great manufacturing hubs to scattered factory towns to distant nations.
At a White House meeting last month, about a dozen executives in the pharmaceutical industry offered to send industry scientists to join the government effort to battle bioterrorism and to follow government direction, in exchange for liability and antitrust protections.
A few months before the price-hikes were due to begin, BusinessWeek, on 25 July 2005, reported (p. 42): "Health insurance may not be the sexiest of businesses, but that hasn't stopped investors from sending industry stocks soaring in recent months.
The attacks sent the industry and American into the biggest downdraft in its history.
And it was opaque trading of arcane derivatives that sent the industry spiralling out of control.
The prospect of losing $12bn in annual profits has sent the industry lobbyists into high gear.
But in a letter sent Friday, industry groups including the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, the American Bankers Association and the Financial Services Roundtable said that banks should not be burdened with the start-up costs.
But elsewhere in the West, Chernobyl, along with the accident at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in 1979, sent the industry into a decline.
Wolf discovered this in 1990, when conflict in the Mideast and a recession at home (sound familiar?) sent the industry into a nose dive.
But the market had already begun to soften last September, when the attack on the World Trade Center sent the industry into a tailspin.
