The Muskrat Gold Mine

Yglesias:

The big economic lesson of 2009-2010 was that it's good to make things that a rapidly growing China wants to buy, which apparently includes muskrat pelts from such upper midwest hotspots as the Dakotas, Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Part of the genius of the muskrat trade is that unlike with many other animals there are few limits to how many you're allowed to trap and kill and "At $10 per pelt—five times what muskrats fetched in the 1990s—pelts were trading at new highs when bidding for last season's furs ended in June."

Interestingly, fur trapping was the main motive for early (largely French) white exploration in this area. Along a variety of dimensions, Asian industrialization seems to be pushing America back to its roots as a natural resource extraction hub.

Well, natural resource extraction is what's driving growth in Canada and Australia, so it isn't too surprising it would spill over here.  Clearly, our mining the soil to produce corn and soybeans for export to China have been helping the economy in the Midwest.  Luckily, we can mine Florida and Saskatchewan to get potash and phosphorus to add back to the soil, and we can use fracked natural gas in Pennsylvania, New York and Ohio to produce nitrogen fertilizer.  Oh, how easy things are when God just leaves stuff for us to plunder.