Certainly, the ties go well beyond the supplying of military might on one side and raw materials on the other.
Iron, coal, limestone and other raw materials went in one end and finished automobiles came out the other.
Speculators do play an important role in setting the price of oil and other raw materials.
American downturns have often caused the prices of oil and other raw materials to slump, but this time China's surging demand is propping up prices and fuelling booms in Brazil, Russia and the Middle East.
He also thinks the company and its rivals should benefit significantly from being able to pass on the increasing cost of rubber and other raw materials because their prices were, in fact, stabilizing.
But China is not the only power interested in securing greater access to Latin American raw materials and other resources.
So just to mine, we have to develop (a) technologies to mine orders of magnitude more quickly than currently exists (b) with autonomous robots that (c) are capable of self-replication from scratch, that is, by smelting metals and fabricating the other materials necessary from the raw materials of Mercury.
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The East Asian countries are big importers of raw materials, so the slump in their economies has pushed down the prices of oil and other commodities such as metals and timber.
The company, which currently gets most of its rubber from a plantation in Liberia, is also exploring other natural materials for producing the raw material for tires, including Russian dandelions and a native Southeast bush called guayule.
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Workers pumped raw materials into one end of his River Rouge plant and drove Model Ts out the other.
The new pipelines will follow the route of the old British-built Burma Road, which still carries timber, gold, gemstones and other Burmese raw materials north to China and brings in cheap manufactures.
Admittedly these gains for developed economies are being partly offset by higher prices for oil and other raw materials, which China also needs to import (of which more in the next article).
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