Shipping & Logistics
What a Bonded Warehouse Is Actually For
Goods can sit inside a country for months without legally having been imported. That gap is more useful than it sounds.
Daniel Okonjo
Contributing writer, Trade War China
Daniel writes about commodities and the inputs that set a price floor.
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11 articles
Shipping & Logistics
The Empty Container Problem
Trade is unbalanced, so boxes pile up where they are not needed and run short where they are. Moving air across oceans is a…
Markets & Commodities
The Floor Under Every Manufactured Price
However sophisticated a product is, someone had to dig up or grow what it is made of. That cost sets a limit on how cheap it can…
Markets & Commodities
Why Industrial Buyers Almost Never Pay the Spot Price
The price quoted in market reports is rarely what a factory pays. Most industrial material moves under contracts that reference it…
Markets & Commodities
How a Reference Price Comes to Exist
Someone has to decide what a barrel or a tonne is worth today. The mechanisms that produce that number vary far more than the…
Markets & Commodities
Copper Is Not One Product, and Neither Is Wheat
Commodities sound interchangeable and are not. Grade, purity and specification decide who can use a shipment and what it fetches.
Markets & Commodities
Reserves in the Ground Are Not Supply
A resource only becomes available when something can process it. Processing capacity, not geology, is usually the binding…
Markets & Commodities
The Materials Nobody Can Produce on Purpose
Some elements are recovered only as a side effect of producing something else. Their supply answers to a market they are not part…
Markets & Commodities
Energy Is Inside Everything You Import
Every traded good carries the energy used to make and move it. That embedded cost travels with the product regardless of where it…
Markets & Commodities
Why a Manufacturer Buys Inputs Before It Needs Them
Forward purchasing is not a bet on prices. It is a way of matching an input commitment to a customer commitment already made.
Markets & Commodities
Why Some Goods Have a Shipping Radius
Freight cost relative to product value quietly decides which goods trade internationally and which never leave their region.