Yeah; things do not bode well and, personally, I think in we're in for a double whammy (in truth, maybe a triple or quadruple whammy) of continued supply chain disruption which will, in turn, only fuel increases in wholesale and retail goods and throw gasoline on the inflationary bonfire that the Biden administration has been able to get roaring in just a scant nine months. If you want to be lectured via euphemism and spin-doctoring, here's the White House's position as of September 23:
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-roo ... sruptions/.
I think--since the media hasn't really been reporting this, or maybe even had it as a priority blip on the radar--that we all tend to see the first real signs of it in the way in which starts to impact our daily lives; things like lowered availability, longer delivery times, and increased prices for the stuff we buy. My eyes sorta opened a few weeks ago when a local famous-for-his-bad-commercials furniture mogul, Jim "Mattress Mack" McIngvale, began talking about "the foam crisis" in his TV ads and how he had beds in stock and ready for delivery. I mean...a
foam crisis? Who knew?
I hate to link to a openly biased rag, but there was an interesting article in
The Atlantic on October 7 by Derek Thompson:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archi ... ge/620322/. I don't know that I can buy into all of his deductions about causative factors (or omissions therein), or all of his conclusions. But remember when someone--now wildly reviled and hated--had slogans like "Make America Great Again" and "America First"? Thompson makes a very salient point:
"Our dearth of manufactured parts and containers is part of a broader crisis of manufactured scarcity in America. A protectionist and anti-growth instinct runs through government.... Focusing on the redistribution of income and goods is natural for today’s progressives, who tend to emphasize the virtue of equality. One lesson of the Everything Shortage is: You cannot redistribute what isn’t created in the first place. The best equality agenda begins with an abundance agenda.... Decades from now, we might look at the legacy of the pandemic, and see that it took a global crisis of choke points to teach us that real progress begins by removing the choke points at home."
The pessimist in me doesn't think this is simply a manufactured scarcity issue, though. I think it runs deeper than that, to people and infrastructure issues (as much as I hate to use that word right now). I had a friend stranded in Miami last Sunday in the whole Southwest Airlines fiasco, which root cause seems to be a lower than optimum number of available flight personnel coupled with an outdated internal system for scheduling and routing those personnel. The molehill turned into a mountain. The U.S. Postal Service has been demonstrating for over a decade now that it can effectively, efficiently, and reliably deliver mail...if it were still 1985. And the Texas February Icepocalypse showed us how well power providers have been maintaining and upgrading their forecasting, scheduling, and delivery systems over the years. But, of course, when the national workforce has turned upside down and companies trying to recover are faced with a dearth of skilled personnel, well, that's the
perfect time for federal overreach and a mandate to private companies that their employees have to be vaccinated or fired.
I'm very worried. The only times we've seen double-digit YOY inflation in the U.S. were 1946, 1974, 1979, and 1980. The highest we've hit since 2007 was 3% in 2011. The historic cycles seem to expansion, reaching a peak, followed by a period of contraction, reaching a trough, followed by expansion again. The Fed is forecasting that we stay in expansion mode through 2023, that we end this year with a 1.8% inflation rate, followed by 1.9% and 2% respectively for 2022 and 2023. And I think they're full of it. National debt ballooning at a rate and to numbers that a Neil deGrasse Tyson would have trouble visualizing, plus a chicken-choked supply-side and consumer prices soaring does not bode well. That and another three years of leadership guaranteed to be more interested in taxation, bigger government, "redistribution of wealth," and pandering to a radical left that is somehow becoming more progressively
(yeah; pun very much intended) influential, and we could be in serious, long-term trouble.
