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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TobagoJack who wrote (133557)	5/6/2017 3:10:39 PM
From: Elroy Jetson	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 217556

In the mystical film "Field of Dreams" a farmer kept hearing "Build it and they will come" - if he built a baseball diamond in his corn field in the middle of nowhere, the ghost of dead baseball players would show up to play exhibition games. It made a fun movie but it's bad economics. Trade routes always created themselves through wear and tear on the landscape created by the constant movement driven by economic need. Arbitrarily dictated routes created by central planning fiat are a "solution" in need of a problem. You're smart enough to know this, but I'll play along with your surmise for fun. Looking at this map of fanciful trade routes, if you wanted to ship some electronics or steel from China to France, is it worth spending the extra time and transportation costs to send them via a scenic journey which includes stopovers in Moscow and other out of the way places? Of course not. You'd ship those goods by a far less costly direct routes. That's what's wrong with this silk-road map which is a museum piece. China is installing oil pipelines between China and Myanmar so their oil tankers can bypass the pirate infested Malacca straits - that particular project has a huge economic reason driving it. China can spend less on naval defense. I'm sure China hopes that their proposed trade route will generate additional economic activity along the route, and that will happen to a degree over time. This route will clearly provide a new transport option for shipping fresh vegetables from Turkey to Moscow. But economists have scored these routes as money losers for many decades and lifetimes into the future because they replace existing cost-efficient routes with fanciful costly routes which serve no obvious purpose for shippers. After seeing the film "Field of Dreams", China's leaders decided to recreate the ancient silk route so Europe can once again purchase spices and silk transported by camels and horses.