Successful trade requires and reinforces trust.
Trust, like morality, seems suddenly to have been rediscovered by Western society. The growth of litigation, particularly in the US, arguably reflects a decline in trust. The need for greater trust in economic relationships is the core argument in the new best-seller, Trust, by the American author Francis Fukuyama. It is not just that if contracts have to be tied down in detailed documentation, then the whole process of trade is slowed. Their community consists in large part of people who had been hippies together in the Sixties' Fukuyama explained that why Silicon Valley in California has been so successful is that people there share knowledge not just with companies with which they are collaborating, but often with competitors too.