I did some brainstorming on discord about the things of or directly related to economics that I could think of and that we don't know. Here's what I got:
- Typical sealmaster tendencies before skywalkers became a thing and how that changed with skywalkers (relevant for, at least, talk about how many skywalkers we can sell to the tower before they run out of money for it)
They won't run out of money as long as the Kage wants more Skywalkers (see my earlier post), since there isn't a Kage right now, it depends on a number of political factors. In-character, it makes sense for the govt to be stockpiling Skywalkers, so they could have up to R250 million extra to spend on the matter, on top of a projected monthly budget of R29.9 million. You could easily defend any number of % distributions of that 29.9 million budget, I don't think 50% for Skywalkers would be out of line if they are actively trying to stockpile them.
- The number of sealmasters at each rank (generalities are fine, but at this level of granularity we probably care about the specifics too)
Calcs are based on 3 Jounin, 10 Chunin, 17 Genin Sealmasters within Leaf.
- Mission pay.
- Our salt production rates, sale price, and other major factors in the enterprise.
- Ditto with ice.
- And Kenta's carpentry business, particularly including the investment we're planning to expand it and, unless I'm mistaken, the talk about branching out into construction.
I do have a rough model for mission pay, but it's in the Econ PMs and haven't heard anything back on it. However, realistically speaing all four of these are basically a rounding error compared to selling seals and clearing land. If we are talking about an actual simulated market, it would be strange if all viable ideas contributed equal (or even the same order of magnitude) profits to the clan. It's much more likely that the top 1-2 ventures generate 80-99%+ of the profit, just as if you were to sample the stock market, a single large cap can dwarf dozens of small-caps.
Salt and ice are valuable commodities in modest quantities but scaling them to the point where they'd compete with arms manufacturing would drive the local price so low that your margins would evaporate. Even if you could get a distribution network in place to spread out the impact, transportation and administration costs would eat further into your profits. It would be difficult to generate more than R1-2 million in profits a month with such efforts.
In comparison, land is the most direct form of capital wealth available in this society and seals, the most directly effective military armament. Land is one of the only viable investments, seals are a (semi) direct conversion of wealth into killing power, they are the economic beneficiaries of a literal arms race between military states. Their demand curves are a lot more attractive for your purposes.
Missions would be viable, though still far less profitable than sealing, if you had a larger number of high-level ninja in the clan.
In the long-term, using your political influence to have the Kage give you kickbacks by [printing money / issuing bonds / using government surplus] to issue lucrative make-work contracts to the Goketsu would be the only thing more potentially profitable than arms dealing or generating arable land.
