The foreign trade spigot

Potentially useful factoid from prime economics blogger Brad Delong:

How cheap is trade today?:
• A standard container, 5500 cubic feet
• An iPhone, worth $200, in a box 1/32 of a cubic foot
• One container can carry $35M in iPhones
• Costs $8000 to ship a container across the Pacific (used to be $3000)

$8000 = two one hundredths (2/100) of one per cent of 35 million. Not two per cent or one per cent, or even one-tenth of one percent, but two one hundredths of one per cent. So much for shipping cost as a friction factor in global trade.