Solving the Pirate Problem: Let’s Start with the Banks
June 17th, 2011
Pirates are a problem. Every year they cost the world between $7 and $12 billion in ransoms, insurance premiums, security equipment, naval forces, prosecutions, anti-piracy organizations, and economic losses to regional economies. And these economic costs don’t include the human ones, which are also sizeable. Every year seafarers are attacked with automatic gunfire and RPGs, beaten, and held in extended confinement as hostages. Pirates sometimes use these hostages as human shields against naval vessels and often abuse their captives, both physically and psychologically. Paul and Rachel Chandler, a retired British couple who were on the “trip of their lifetime,”...
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