Dissonant Harmony

When it comes to political intrigue and natural resources, the main suspects are easy to spot. Oil. Coal. Gold. Rubber. Travertine.

Travertine?

Admittedly, nobody’s going to war over deposits of the golden stone, or clashing over marble and granite. Natural stone, though, appears in some of the hot spots around the globe – and, thanks to an international show of unity, may get a free pass around any economic actions.

The latest example of this is Iran, where unrest after June elections continues to draw the world’s attention (save for a few days of the fatal attraction of Michael Jackson). For weeks, there’ve been countless emails, Twitter tweets and other fractured reports about turmoil in the streets.

Strong protests from countries around the globe will inevitably lead to calls for action. The easy route is economic sanctions, likely in the form of the boycott or interdiction of Iranian products in the world market. It’s been the standard policy of the United States through six presidential administrations since Iran’s 1979 revolution (although the two countries did record $600 million in trade last year, with U.S. exports trumping Iranian imports by a 4:1 ratio).

The biggie here, of course, is oil. The country also offers numerous other natural resources; stone probably doesn’t make many lists for possible economic action.

Readers of the annual stone-market analysis from Carlo Montani and Faenza Editrice in Milan, Italy, know better. Montani’s World Marketing Handbook shows that, when it comes to calcareous stones – marble and travertine, for the most part – Iran’s a major player in natural stone.

Montani’s research shows that Iran is actually the fourth-largest quarrier of dimensional stone in the world, after China, India and Italy. And, in 2007 – the last year that data is available – Iran exported 567,796 metric tons of raw calcareous stone (mainly travertine and marble), or 6.9 percent of the world’s trade.

It’s that raw-stone figure that can be the bugaboo. It’s one thing to make a fuss about finished products, although the major traders with Iran and its processed stone – Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Azerbaijan and Saudi Arabia – are unlikely sanction partners. It’s the unfinished blocks of stone that can literally sail past any economic walls.

That’s where the concept of harmonized tariffs comes into play. Based on international codes and agreements, customs assessments are made based on the condition of materials at the time of importation.

If a material or resource is processed in a particular country, harmonized tariffs recognize the processing country as the designated exporting country. And it doesn’t take much to see that raw stone from a country like Iran flows into the world trade flow as a processed product from somewhere else.

In case you’re wondering where that Iranian raw calcareous stone went in 1997, the bulk – 79 percent – sailed to China, with another 7.4 percent going to Italy. Trying to identify Iranian stone in the massive processing factories of both countries would be needle-in-the-haystack time.

Iran’s not the only case of stone exports getting a new identity. It’s not illegal by any literal stretch of international law, and nobody’s going to swoop in and seize slabs and tiles out of the local stoneyard. Stone and politics aren’t a point of controversy.

Not yet, anyway.

– Emerson Schwartzkopf

You can read up-to-the-minute news on the dimensional-stone trade and search the archives at Stone Business Online, where you can also find this blog at the Main Menu under the clever title of “Editor’s Blog.”

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Hey, What Happened to the Blog?

There’s no point in hiding any longer – yes, I’m Derivative Man, and one of the four people in the world who really understand Wall Street finance. I’ve been huddled with our nation’s leaders for six days on the bailout, and you don’t want to be in a room with these people for 16 hours straight. When Sen. Charles Schumer decided to give a working example of naked shorts at midnight last Wednesday ….

OK, it’s all hogwash (although I’ll bet you’ll have a hard time getting an image of ol’ Chuck out of your imagination.) I’ve been working like blazes to get the next issue of Stone Business primped and polished before heading to Verona, Italy, for the huge Marmomacc trade event. Something had to go on idle.

I’ll make it up to readers next week with some reports from the road as I cross a continent, an ocean, the Alps and invariably some Italian truck drivers along the way. You’ll also get a sense of what’s happening at Marmomacc, which resembles more of a small city than a trade show.

To those few who’ve missed me, my apologies. Keep reading.

– Emerson Schwartzkopf

You can read up-to-the-minute news on the dimensional-stone trade and search the archives at www.stonebusiness.net, where you can also find this blog at the Main Menu under the clever title of “Editor’s Blog.”

The advertisements that appear on this page are placed by wordpress.com, and constitute no endorsement of the products or services. And I don’t get a dime from them, either.

 

Diversion: The Games We Played, Olympics-Style

I could probably write several large blog entries on why I don’t watch the Olympics anymore, but the sentiment boils down to this: These people are strange.

No, no, it’s not that they come from all over the world; global competition is great. It’s the competitors themselves that I find unsettling; the participants are beyond buff and toned, and move into the realm of customized humanoids. And the fact that they now sport engineered garments to enhance their performance gives them more of an otherworldly look than an international air.

If there’s an Olympics that I identify with, it’s the Munich games in 1972. You got the sense of ordinary people doing extraordinary things, even with the athletes from the Soviet Bloc. (Well, maybe not the East German women, but that’s another matter.) Runners looked lean, not sculpted with CAD/CAM to maximize power and reduce wind resistance. And Olga Korbut looked cute, and not like a 5:8-scale model of a human.

If you’re like me and wonder where your Olympic spirit went – or if you’re still on a gold-medal high and crave more – it’s worth the time to read Rome 1960 – The Olympics That Changed The World by David Maraniss. It chronicles an event that’s just a bit too early for me to remember, but it reflects an Olympic ideal that I’ll always miss.

Maraniss is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for the Washington Post and wrote an incisive biography of Bill Clinton (First in His Class), but he’s also written some of the best non-sports books about athletes, where you learn far more about the person than their performance. His biography of football coach Vince Lombardi (When Pride Still Mattered) is a classic study of a driven-but-curiously-insecure leader.

Rome 1960 shows that particular Olympics as a turning point, and not solely due to individual performances. There’s the emergence of African-American athletes, particularly women; the beginning of payola sponsorships with German sprinter Armin Hary; the breakout of the Soviet Union as a major track-and-field force; and the Olympics itself as a proxy Cold War.

Perhaps the best of the book comes with the final chapters on the marathon. It’s a story that anyone acquainted with the Olympics knows, as Ethiopian palace guard Abebe Bikila ran the entire distance barefoot and set a new Olympic record … in the city of a country that, less than a quarter-century earlier, attacked and subdued his own land in war.

As he’s done in the past, Maraniss has crafted a book about sports that shies away from jock talk and superlatives, and more on personal and political backstories that truly represent the human drama of athletic competition. (And, yes, there’s Jim McKay in the book as well.) Even for someone who wouldn’t know a dash from a decathlon, Rome 1960 is a captivating look at an Olympics – and a world situation – we’ll never see again.

– Emerson Schwartzkopf

“Diversion” is the once-a-month entry that’s totally devoted to something other than dimensional stone … sometimes, you gotta take a break.

You can read up-to-the-minute news on the dimensional-stone trade and search the archives at www.stonebusiness.net, where you can also find this blog at the top of the home page under the clever title of “Editor’s Blog.”