Economic acts of god (Golden Rainbow)

hey folks, I'm a relatively new player here, or rather I'm getting back into the game after an absence of a few years.

One of the more peculiar things I've noticed are some 'anomalies' on th world market in GR, and presumably the other worlds as well (tho I haven't checked). Practically every single tradable commodity EXCEPT for defensive weapons are in constant massive shortages. Yet somehow corps are able to keep purchasing what they need to keep functioning. And the commodity prices seem to kept within a certain range by (I assume) the gamemaster. I understand that these measures are probably needed to keep the global economy from completely tanking, but it's kind of a massive cheat and it leads to massively imbalanced economies. Was this done to keep the game simple and easy, or to prevent players from manipulating the global markets, or for some other reason?

Another, seperate observation: it looks like a lot of people invested a lot of GM into building and growing space programs, and there's almost no activity on the space markets. What's up with that? I've seen a few ships trading but most of them seem to sit still and almost all the markets are dead. Seems like a massive waste of capital to me.

Am I outta my mind? I just get the impression that the game's economic engines aren't really being used to their full capacity, and that a lot more wealth creation could be occuring than actually is.

I really liked the title of this post.

Markets in simcountry have always been prevented from a collaps.
Some products are added if really needed but never flipping shortages into a surplus.

We would love to see these balancing functions remaining idle for a long period of time.

Balancing the market has always been hard and players did not take full advantage of the possible profits from products that are nearly always in short supplies.

we think that trading will become more interesting once the space market start to function.

this will happen when :

1. Cargo shuttle automation is introduced to simplify the movements of products to and from space stations. (will be finished within several weeks).
2. When this is in place, many more products will be traded on space stations and
3. We will start differentiating between the worlds with some products being produced on one or two worlds only, making space trading more important but easy to perform.
4. Once running, we will allow the price range of products to flutuate more. Doing so now, might cause problems on the market and bankrupt many corporations. Once there is a inter plannet market and more possibilities to make high profits, we hope that players will sieze the opportunity and while making a profit, fix the market shortages.

@Tom:

That sounds like 2 birds with one stone. Cool.

To quote the 9th rule of acquisition,
"Opportunity plus instinct equals profit."

While I really enjoyed the title of this post. JayPee "Economic Acts of the 'Game-Gods'", as they are often called