by Lord Ewen » Thu Jul 10, 2014 3:04 pm
Buying sufficient lumber to improve existing fortifications at a few locations should be well within our means. Cornering the market on lumber, on the other hand, is likely beyond our ability even with Sir Ewen plundering Thilisa's life savings. Part of the problem is the ubiquity and dispersal of the resource. The timberwright's guild has rights to cut and harvest timber, but so does every significant landholder in the kingdom on their own property. Now perhaps only the timberwrights actually season and stockpile the stuff, I don't know, and that would limit the resource considerably. Nobles have to obtain royal clearance, I believe, to make improvements to their fortifications, so that would disincline them toward stockpiling. But even so, for us to make a dent in the general availability, we would have to buy up a tremendous amount of wood, no?
I believe the anachronistic way of doing this would be to leverage the purchase of the targeted commododies by obtaining loans, buy up the resource and then sell high when the war kicks in and prices soar, paying back the loan with the proceeds. But that's more a Rennaisance era innovation, I think, and therefore probably not within our intellectual arsenal. So we are stuck with cash on hand, right?
Note that we have already flirted with one important cornering of a market, by retaining the Blue Boars both for our own use and to prevent others from accessing them. Should we consider expanding this venture?
I do like the idea of identifying and buying up critical resources. Aside from lumber, any other potential targets?