Sublime

For fifty years after the turn of the century, shipbuilders and shipping companies worked hard both to make ships faster and to lower their fuel consumption. Even so, the more successful they were in boosting speed and trimming their fuel needs, the worse the economics of ocean freighters became. By 1950 or so, the ocean freighter was dying, if not

Once again, however, the opportunity for financial innovation was provided by war.

Even today, it is often cheaper to ship goods thousands of miles by water than to ship them hundreds of miles by land.

Post-1973 globalization has more than tripled the mass of seaborne trade and brought major shifts in its composition.[76] While in 1973 tanker traffic (dominated by crude oil and refined products) accounted for more than half of the transported total, in 2018 goods amounted to about 70 percent, a shift reflecting not only the rise of Asia—and, abov

In 1961, before the container was in international use, ocean freight costs alone accounted for 12 percent of the value of U.S. exports and 10 percent of the value of U.S. imports.

The biggest challenge facing pricing in the modern world is overcapacity

It’s not hard to appreciate the bureau’s plight. Everybody wanted standards—it’s not as if manufacturers took pride in making incompatible hoses. It’s just that each firm desperately wanted its way of doing things to be the standard way, and for good reason. Losing a standards war meant having to retool, which might require purchasing expensive new