From the Mandarin Oriental Hotel's 23rd-floor bar the other evening, with its desert views and $18 specialty cocktails, the new building-size digital billboards that loom over the Strip flashed out advertisements not for the slots, but for Tiesto, the D.J. playing at Hakkasan, a 75,000-square-foot nightclub where reserving a table for the night can cost $10,000 and more.
And even where reserves could have been brought up, their movement was sometimes inhibited by hesitation and dissension on the Germans' own side.
Yet, in the case of commodities, where reserves are limited and the rate of extraction constrained, producers with rights over the available resources call the shots.
They bring prices elsewhere in the country closer to levels in New York, where reserve requirements -- and hence prices -- have long been the highest in the nation.
A notable success has been in St. Lucia, in the Caribbean, where reserves established in the mid-1990's increased nearby catches up to 90percentt.
An aide from Martinique, where reserve is the social norm, said that she was less popular than more gregarious women and often criticized for not smiling.
While regulators grappled with the reserve question and one another, a wave of transactions washed through the life insurance industry, sweeping billions of dollars' worth of business offshore, where reserve requirements are different.
The pioneering transatlantic voyage proved that gas in this state could be transported safely from producer to consumer and from remote areas where reserves are large to the places where there is a market for natural gas.
The plans to buy XTO, which are subject to approval, reflected Exxon's enthusiasm for unconventional gas resources, where reserves have swelled because of innovations in producing gas from a type of rock called shale.
It was only nine o'clock when the boat arrived at a neat compound of concrete-block buildings and gardens, where reserve officials and staff, some with their families, lived, surrounded by high, stout wire fencing.
Other important areas are the estuaries and scrubland along the Nissequogue, Connetquot and Carmans Rivers, where reserves and parks are interspersed with private land that is under development pressure.
