Look." I pointed. "Shin-Tethys as a whole maintains a positive trade surplus with the rest of the system. A third of the local nations don't export directly, but there's a lot of internal, intramural trade between the tribes-the main six exporters account for eighty-two percent of the uranium and fifty-seven percent of the rare earths. What comes in is, well, lots of skilled labor, finished high-tech assemblies, anything that needs microgravity or vacuum or very high temperatures or an anaerobic environment. In other words, it's your typical pattern for an energy-exporting planet, with the added twist that because it's very damp, a lot of planetary surface activities-smelting metals, manufacturing ceramics-are expensive to perform locally. The only interesting thing is how little slow money is going into their economic system. As for banking corruption, there's the usual, but no more than the usual. Around one government per decade-out of nearly five hundred, mind-gets into bad trouble one way or another. But the system is self-stabilizing: What usually happens is that a consortium of their trading partners and main creditors get together and mount a hostile takeover-I believe they call it a "war"-and place the defaulter under administration until it digs itself out of the hole."
( Charles Stross )
[ Neptune's Brood ]
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