Name: A splendid exchange
ISBN: 9780802144164

arjieMay 2026

The oil market effects have been fascinating to see. I only vaguely paid attention to it in the past (back in the peak oil days) but it's interesting to see how the chain of things work. You can produce oil type A and it can be useless because you run refineries type B, but those type B refineries are more profitable to run because the byproducts are really valuable. So you sell oil A and buy oil B and everyone is happy but then one day you go and raise oil B prices and you end up selling cheap oil and buying expensive oil so even though you produce more than anyone else, you still suffer the consequences. In fact, you can process oil A through your things but then the fancy machinery you bought sits idle, and you raised the money to buy that on the assumption you could process oil B and get byproducts.

That and the constraint on GPUs and datacenters and all has really brought home to me what a globalized economy we live in and how much our prosperity has depended on us being peacefully happy to trade with each other. One of my favourite books on the general subject of trade is A Splendid Exchange which gives a cool directionally-correct view of how valuable trade is.

Funny to think that Pax Americana would be ended by America.

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arjieDec 2025

I don't think you can have a "free and global market" when countries participate in large-scale state industrial policy. Given those constraints, you have to either enforce a zero-subsidy environment (the US has no power to do this) or you have to accept that trade control is one arm of your foreign policy goals and surrendering it entirely is unlikely to help your aims.

For the most part, free and open trade is beneficial to the Western world order. But I think it's quite straightforward to imagine conditions under which it is not, many of which are currently in effect.

US control of EUV technology is probably the most obvious present one, but limitations on nuclear proliferation are an obvious case where there is no free market. Even selling civilian nuclear technology is controlled.

You may think of it analogously to Free Speech. The dream is complete and total expression. The reality is that if you allow convincing enough liars, your society starts to falter. Consequently, certain kinds of expression are not permitted - notably defamation. Think of it as more a North Star navigation ideal constrained by the trade winds (I suppose the Westerlies would be more relevant, but I couldn't resist the pun).

If you want a couple of reads, I enjoyed A Splendid Exchange about the history of trade, which I followed by the resurgent-though-once-dismissed Zeihan's Disunited Nations (which is more a hypothesis book than a history book).

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JackFrSep 2020

The Rise of Financial Capitalism: International Capital Markets in the Age of Reason (Studies in Monetary and Financial History) https://www.amazon.com/dp/0521457386/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_i-...

Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises, Seventh Edition https://www.amazon.com/dp/B017J5HBMS/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_r.pw...

Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation https://www.amazon.com/dp/0452281806/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_.a...

A History of Interest Rates, Fourth Edition (Wiley Finance) https://www.amazon.com/dp/0471732834/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_-c...

A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World https://www.amazon.com/dp/0802144160/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_Hg...

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pseudolusDec 2019

"A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World" by William Bernstein provides a sweeping overview of world trade - including spices [0].

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Splendid-Exchange-Trade-Shaped-World/...

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JackFrJul 2019

More popular history:

https://www.amazon.com/Ascent-Money-Financial-History-World/...