Did the MBS corner the market on trade?

Actually, that long message/shipping delay time is another reason systems might keep more domestic production.

Here on Earth if you unexpectedly have a critical component break, or your production line is going to stall because a shipment got delayed you can immediately contact even international suppliers and (assuming the economic losses/penalties from delay exceed the shipping cost) pay for air freight to get the things urgently (often within a day).

Doesn't work so well if it takes a month (or several) to let the supplier know you need it and at least that long again for the stuff to make its way back to you. There's just not much that can be done to expedite delivery no matter how much you're willing to pay. Even the fastest freighter, with military grade rad shielding and hyper generators can only cut by transit time by a bit more than half -- not the 25 times faster air freight is than a cargo ship.
But if there's a local producer well then you can get back up in days not months.

(Though paying to maintain a suitably large warehouse of spares / buffer of your imported parts that could achieve much the same effect -- but also at significant cost)

Jonathan_S wrote:Actually, that long message/shipping delay time is another reason systems might keep more domestic production.

I agree that that might be a reason that they should keep more domestic product. But considering humanity, do you really think that they do? Having long since become complacent on the timely fashion in which the wheel in the cog turns? That damn Manty Merchant fleet are like clockwork. Dependable. Reliable. No need to stock or save for a rainy day. The mail runs rain, sleet or snow. The only entity that stocks for its future is the military.

Jonathan_S wrote:Here on Earth if you unexpectedly have a critical component break, or your production line is going to stall because a shipment got delayed you can immediately contact even international suppliers and (assuming the economic losses/penalties from delay exceed the shipping cost) pay for air freight to get the things urgently (often within a day).

That doesn't work so well if someone has cornered the market. Everyone is clamoring for the same goods because nobody saw it coming. You can turn to another supplier, but their current inventory and a lot of their future inventory has been bought already!

Jonathan_S wrote:Doesn't work so well if it takes a month (or several) to let the supplier know you need it and at least that long again for the stuff to make its way back to you. There's just not much that can be done to expedite delivery no matter how much you're willing to pay. Even the fastest freighter, with military grade rad shielding and hyper generators can only cut by transit time by a bit more than half -- not the 25 times faster air freight is than a cargo ship.
But if there's a local producer well then you can get back up in days not months.

(Though paying to maintain a suitably large warehouse of spares / buffer of your imported parts that could achieve much the same effect -- but also at significant cost)

That local producer's inventory has been bought as well. The market has been cornered! Now the local producer is being hit with supply and demand and they have to sell their product at prices bordering piracy. And being undercut by the people who now have their goods. And they bought them at the then rock bottom prices.

penny wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:Actually, that long message/shipping delay time is another reason systems might keep more domestic production.

I agree that that might be a reason that they should keep more domestic product. But considering humanity, do you really think that they do? Having long since become complacent on the timely fashion in which the wheel in the cog turns? That damn Manty Merchant fleet are like clockwork. Dependable. Reliable. No need to stock or save for a rainy day. The mail runs rain, sleet or snow. The only entity that stocks for its future is the military.

Even if it runs reliably the very long shipping times means the company has paid for a lot of product that's somewhere in the months long delivery pipeline -- that's like paying for a multi-month warehouse inventory buffer; except starship holds presumably charge more per cubic meter than a warehouse would. And either way you've sunk a bunch of capital into components you can't sell yet; meaning you can't use that capital for other things (like expanding your factory, or R&D, or just advertising).

The faster delivery from local production means you can turn that money around faster and don't need to keep as much tied up in components you can't use yet. So that gives local producers that bit more of a cost advantage; as the interstellar imports need to be sufficiently cheaper to offset all that opportunity cost.

penny wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:Here on Earth if you unexpectedly have a critical component break, or your production line is going to stall because a shipment got delayed you can immediately contact even international suppliers and (assuming the economic losses/penalties from delay exceed the shipping cost) pay for air freight to get the things urgently (often within a day).

That doesn't work so well if someone has cornered the market. Everyone is clamoring for the same goods because nobody saw it coming. You can turn to another supplier, but their current inventory and a lot of their future inventory has been bought already!

Jonathan_S wrote:Doesn't work so well if it takes a month (or several) to let the supplier know you need it and at least that long again for the stuff to make its way back to you. There's just not much that can be done to expedite delivery no matter how much you're willing to pay. Even the fastest freighter, with military grade rad shielding and hyper generators can only cut by transit time by a bit more than half -- not the 25 times faster air freight is than a cargo ship.
But if there's a local producer well then you can get back up in days not months.

(Though paying to maintain a suitably large warehouse of spares / buffer of your imported parts that could achieve much the same effect -- but also at significant cost)

That local producer's inventory has been bought as well. The market has been cornered! Now the local producer is being hit with supply and demand and they have to sell their product at prices bordering piracy. And being undercut by the people who now have their goods. And they bought them at the then rock bottom prices.

But if you're already buying from that local producer then you're already one of those people who has bought up all the future production -- so on Earth you're just calling them up to tell them you're paying for them to stick your next shipment on a plane instead of a cargo container headed for the port. And if you're in the Honorverse then at least the next shipment is likely showing up sooner since being in the same system it can be shipped in smaller more frequent shipments.

Or there's the times where it's not a cornered market and they do have spare inventory to sell you; it's just a matter of how long it take to let them know and for it to get shipped back.


Hmm, given the stupendous volumes that an Honorverse freighter can carry - and that they seem to operate on infrequent but very large deliveries - I wonder what kind of insurance or warehouse buffer companies would need to protect themselves should a shipment be lost to accident or pirates?
That freighter might have been bringing in all the widgets for your next 3-6 months of production. Do you keep enough in the warehouse to keep the production lines running until the next such giant shipment arrives? (Heck, just the warehousing to handle the surge of a large shipment coming in until you can slowly consume your way through it would be a non-trivial cost)

As I have pointed out previously food is a major potential problem.
I believe that many on here are apartment dwellers, or at least big city residents, so don't relate.
I grew up on an Australian Station (Ranch), still live on acreage, and grow stuff as an interest.
From planting to harvest can be months (if you have the seed stock), animals take years.
Just saying, "'OK we'll start growing our own food"" doesn't cut it, when you have just in time food deliveries that stop.
A comment relating to Steve Stirling's Ends the Fire series, joked that if society stopped, alien visitors years hence might wonder about all of the rings of bones around the fast food joints.

It was my understanding that except for odd cases like Grayson (and even they were mostly alright once they got the orbital farms up and running) most planets were self-sufficient for food for because it is something that was always needed/in demand and so leaving it to the whims of interstellar freight was just asking for trouble.

That is not to say there isn't a market for exotic/luxury food stuffs, like Beef from Montana, but that generally most planets can and do feed themselves out of local means.

Dauntless wrote:It was my understanding that except for odd cases like Grayson (and even they were mostly alright once they got the orbital farms up and running) most planets were self-sufficient for food for because it is something that was always needed/in demand and so leaving it to the whims of interstellar freight was just asking for trouble.

That is not to say there isn't a market for exotic/luxury food stuffs, like Beef from Montana, but that generally most planets can and do feed themselves out of local means.

That was my understanding.
There might be temporary emergencies (say an unexpected setback in adapting plants to a new planet - or some other agricultural disaster) that require import of food to prevent starvation. But that should very much be the exception.

A planet (or two) is a lot of area to stick your agriculture and farming techniques should have improved - so planets (or systems) should be able to feed themselves even if much of the biosphere(s) aren't amenable to farming. Plus it seems like housing densities are much higher than current day (what with massive residential towers - or orbiting habitats); meaning that even very large populations leave lots of land available for agriculture.
It'd be a very rare planet that would willingly chose to be dependent on external food suppliers.

(Yes, there are some countries on Earth that are -- but the communication / transit times, and multiplicity of suppliers, are such that if there are going to be problems with the steady flow of that food they've generally got time to react and purchase foodstuffs from another source, or beg for assistance [depending on their finances]. That'd be a lot riskier in the Honorverse due to the slow communication -- by the time they find out there's going to be a disruption to their imported food, send out buyers or order from other systems, and finally get that food back it might be the better part of a year. (And given the inability to communicate quickly do you send out one order to one alternate source and risk it not being able to be fulfilled, or do you send out a bunch of orders and risk them all being accepted burying you in food that may spoil before it can be used [and wasting your foreign exchange]?)

Remember when Just-In-Time delivery was (having been used for a number of years in Japan) suddenly all the rage and everybody was cutting warehouse space/people and shifting to interesting algorithm of buying parts for future delivery which also adjusted the way they restructured various manufacturing and assembly lines (not the same thing) to greatly reduce both inventory costs and labor....perhaps management incomes not so much?

It works until it doesn't. You have shipping strike and though you may scramble to use other carries to move goods in truckload lots etc your production goes down, you have to lay off people, you can't make delivery dates and there are penalties. The alternative sources- you might have had, certainly our on internal buffer in everything to components to replacement parts for your equipment has already been pared down to levels guesstimated on some mean-time-between-failures BY PART FOR YOUR EQUIPMENT, AND THAT INCLUDES REPAIR EQUIPMENT.

So, if you lucky and management will allow it, you do have a stock parts and components that you can normally just cycle though with an average of a couple of weeks worth of materials on-hand if something breaks the delivery systems.
Then you also have the difficulties now when things you believe are still made "here" are not. Oh, the names of the products are the same, even the company names are the same...but the direct ownership is not "from here", it's across international boarders and even oceans. And the actual manufacturing is going on outside your boarders even if some parts are made here.

Restoring the capacity along with training up the workforce to do that needs to be done will also take time. Then there is the SMALL problem that the owners of the companies probably hold the patents as part of purchase along with trade names and other critical legal pieces that will prevent the people "here" from making XYX because of regulations both here and abroad.

You might even have to license back the right to manufacture the goods to be able to get them at all but pay hefty royalties to do it.

Businesses have to rely on profits to keep the companies open. If the "off shore" manufacture can produce and ship (or force you to pay the shipping) then they can effectively blockade a give product at any time just by not selling it to you....or they will sell it to somebody else who will sell it to you at an even higher price and longer delays and still hold the control of access.

So far, it has been difficult to do much to try and enforce various labor regulations and other things elsewhere for doing things (like child labor in mines or sweatshops for garments) because, usually, resetting up the production capacity and acquiring the skilled (or even unskilled) labor force it way too expensive and people really do tend to go with less expensive goods....until your freezer that should have been traditionally been good for 10+ years dies a month after your expensive extended warrantee. expired.

No, I don't have a good solution.

Brigade XO wrote:Lacoon One was a major problem for the League and a lot of other systems. We were told that- at least at some point in its travels- something like 50% of the League goods moved on Manticore Flagged ships. What that did was mess up practically every regular trading rout, even within the League since for every ship which repatriated to Manticore, a high percentage of that cargo capacity would have had to been replaced from other sources.
In a perfect world, all of the MMM ships would have dropped their cargos (which were not heading out though the MWJ or though Hennessy on those ships) at whatever cargo storage facilities were available at the port where they received the Lacoon notice. Even with leaving all that material and goods w/i the League (or those areas controlled or patrolled by OFS and FF) there would be a very hectic long term scramble to find space for even partial lots of that freight on other vessels. It also removed that MMM shipping from the ability of the SLN to ship materials etc on commercial vessels without activating various laws (which we presume were on the books like the Taken Up From Trade ships and current Earth wet navies also have similar contracted arrangements) That now pressing need for the SLN to even move goods by taking over commercial capacity further messed with a lot of economies. Did any star systems go broke? Not likely. What was going to happen is a lot of companies and people/investors were going to be ruined.
Lacoon II massively screwed up the SLN ability to move ships around to where it needed them outside the Core and also effectively slammed shut the wormholes to most traffic lagged in the League.


Humans have been very good at figuring out new and faster (and or more secure) ways of moving data and information. Until the advent of transoceanic telegraph cables, the fastest way of moving anything around the world was by ship. Lots of ships were optimized for speed (think China Clippers to haul tea and other products) but it routine in certainly the 18th century to send critical messages in several copies with only the 1st arriving at the intended destination to be acted on. Sending financial drafts for payment or order goods and authorize payment for them were normally sent in at least triplicate using three separate ships.

The commercial world adjusts to what is possible for information. Couriers today routinely travel by commercial transport. Stock Market data from any given place goes by electronic transmission. That's not possible over interstellar distances but all sorts of "mail" is going to be sent using commercial transport and that would run from Dispatch Boats, fighters, passenger liners- whatever is heading in a particular direction to pass off the mail to other carriers.

When you have long distances and time delays, that falls back on your local agent(s) in business or anything else to use their judgement to make decisions. It's just a function of doing business.

Interesting post.

The commercial world does adjust to what is possible for information. And transportation. This allows me to comment on someone pointing out that the HV was patterned after the age of sail. Although that fact is true, does it remain true? Certainly not on the same degree? Nowhere near it actually. It has been speculated that there are still generation ships that have not arrived at their destination when the HV was first created. Ships were very slow. There was no hyper travel? There was no MWJ. Things are different now and the HV has become reliant upon the very significant progress. And the HV would adjust its practices and habits to reflect it.


An aside. Could a successful strategy of commerce raiding that includes DBs artificially create the impact of Lacoon? There would be no orders of goods made. No flow of goods and no information flow.

penny wrote:This allows me to comment on someone pointing out that the HV was patterned after the age of sail. Although that fact is true, does it remain true? Certainly not on the same degree? Nowhere near it actually.

The point about age of sail, was that it could take weeks to months for goods and information to go from one part of civilization to another. That is still true (unless there is a direct connection via wormhole), even with a streak drive to cut days off of voyage.

Jonathan_S wrote:

Dauntless wrote:It was my understanding that except for odd cases like Grayson (and even they were mostly alright once they got the orbital farms up and running) most planets were self-sufficient for food for because it is something that was always needed/in demand and so leaving it to the whims of interstellar freight was just asking for trouble.

That is not to say there isn't a market for exotic/luxury food stuffs, like Beef from Montana, but that generally most planets can and do feed themselves out of local means.

That was my understanding.
There might be temporary emergencies (say an unexpected setback in adapting plants to a new planet - or some other agricultural disaster) that require import of food to prevent starvation. But that should very much be the exception.

A planet (or two) is a lot of area to stick your agriculture and farming techniques should have improved - so planets (or systems) should be able to feed themselves even if much of the biosphere(s) aren't amenable to farming. Plus it seems like housing densities are much higher than current day (what with massive residential towers - or orbiting habitats); meaning that even very large populations leave lots of land available for agriculture.
It'd be a very rare planet that would willingly chose to be dependent on external food suppliers.

(Yes, there are some countries on Earth that are -- but the communication / transit times, and multiplicity of suppliers, are such that if there are going to be problems with the steady flow of that food they've generally got time to react and purchase foodstuffs from another source, or beg for assistance [depending on their finances]. That'd be a lot riskier in the Honorverse due to the slow communication -- by the time they find out there's going to be a disruption to their imported food, send out buyers or order from other systems, and finally get that food back it might be the better part of a year. (And given the inability to communicate quickly do you send out one order to one alternate source and risk it not being able to be fulfilled, or do you send out a bunch of orders and risk them all being accepted burying you in food that may spoil before it can be used [and wasting your foreign exchange]?)

Cornering the market was never really about foodstuffs. Although the market for some specialized individual foodstuffs can be cornered. Like Montana steaks. Cornering these markets can certainly make an unscrupulous entity a lot of money, but it is not going to detrimentally affect a system's livelihood.

Cornering the market whereupon it can have disastrous effects is when a much needed item throughout the galaxy has been cornered. Every system may not be able to produce certain specific items that are taken for granted which may be utilized to produce critical technologies. Like, perhaps, fusion powered reactors. Critical energy components. Critical starship components, etc. Even if a system has the raw materials, that system may not have the ability, tools, expertise or knowhow to produce certain items that the system -- in the name of progress -- has allowed the planet to become dependent upon over time. Progress is a two-edged sword. The most seemingly innocuous item can have a negative impact on production and detrimental effects to the economy. Which could cripple already weak and strong economies alike.

Look at the trade war going on now regarding gallium and germanium used to make computer chips. China is curbing its exports of the materials. The US is curbing the final product, thus its knowhow. So, even though your country has the resources, if you don't know what to do with those resources to make the product you may as well not have them. Except in your export business.