At the start, you'll find that furniture, machine parts, steel, lumber, ammunition and a few other resources are very scarce. If you play an unmodded Revolutions, those goods will start appearing on the world market in the 50's, 60's depending on the situation.
Now, I have never seen a shortage of tropical wood. There are huge number of provinces producing that in Asia, Africa and South America. There should be a huge surplus. The reason you might experience shortage is because you are buying too little. If you have several Luxury Furniture factories and your work hour efficiancy is too little (you haven't researched appropriate techs or built railroads) it may happen that even if you set buy 5 it's not enough to keep all your factories open. You're buying 5 daily and your factories need for example 7.2 daily to work properly. Try setting buy 25 and you'll almost never run out of that resource. Just a wild guess of what may be happening.
Also, try to steer clear of high tech factories at the beginning. Artillery, Luxury Furniture, Machine Parts, Small Arms, Luxury Clothes etc... They use a lot of products as resources so in the end you may end up with negative profit. In the beginning, your friends are factories that use only raw materials, or mostly raw materials, like Lumber Mill, Steel, Ammunition, Fertilizer, Cement, Fabrics, Glass, Canned Food factory etc... Even if you do not own any iron or coal producing provinces and have to import those raw materials, your Steel factory will turn in a profit from day one. After you get build level one or two railroads, start building next tier of factories which are a bit more sophisticated, like Paper Mill, Regular Clothes, Regular Furniture and so on. And after you research and build level 3 or level 4 railroads, only then start building truly sophisticated factories like Luxury Clothes, Machine Parts, Explosives, Artillery and so on. In the beginning, your Lumber Mill will barely produce enough lumber to keep one Regular Furniture factory working, while later in the game, when you have built level 4 or 5 railroads, one Lumber Mill can produce enough lumber to keep 3 Regular Furniture Factory working...
If you have a Laissez Faire party in power, you can still affect what factories your capitalists build. They tend to build factories for which you are producing raw materials and other resources. So if you're producing both Iron and Coal, your capis are more than likely to build Steel factories, or Cement, or Glass. If you don't like what factory your capis are building simply close it and delete it (you can do this even while factory is under construction). They will more often than not start to build another factory of a different type. If you have a lot of Glass factories and you're up to your head in glass, and your capis insist on building more, simply close the biggest one (probably level 2 or 3 by then) and you'll free up 10 or 15 workers that can be used to fill other, much more important factories...
Remember, if you're not playing Great Powers like China, UK, Russia, Germany your goal is not to produce huge amounts of everything but to strike a balance that will ensure a balanced economy and a wealthy country.
And don't thing that 100,000 pounds is a lot. It isn't. After you go over half a million you could say you're "in the green".
