Way back when the government kicked off the Covid panic, smart people pointing out that shutting down the world to bend the curve was not a cost free way of addressing the problem. In fact, it was a very expensive and risky solution to a problem that was best addressed through traditional means. The world has a pandemic every 15 years and a severe one at least once a generation. Humans have figured out to tough out these naturally occurring events.
Shutting down the world and making people stay home from work is a novel invention, so there was no way to know what would happen. Human societies are tough, so it took a while for the problems to manifest. Initially, those who could work from home worked from home and those unemployed were supported with subsidies. This could never be a permanent condition, so we have been trying to transition back to normalcy for the last six months, but things are nowhere near normal.
The Brits have gasoline shortages, and they are facing a winter with spiraling natural gas prices, because the energy supply chain is a mess. Keeping people at home meant keeping people out of their cars, which collapsed fuel consumption. The trucks and truck drivers were put to other uses and now that demand is returning, they suddenly have a shortage of trucks and truck drivers. This will soon hit other parts of the supply chain as demand suddenly increases for goods and services.
In the US, ports are a mess as they face similar supply chain problems. The ports in America are weird systems. The labor is unionized, but the unions are pretty much run by the government under an array of consent decrees. Demand for labor is driven by the ships in port needing to be loaded and unloaded. The stevedoring firms hire when they need to unload a ship, but they keep few fulltime people. They simply draw from the pool of longshoremen that operate at the port.
During the shutdowns, fewer ships came into port, so fewer people were needed to unload ships and fewer trucks were needed to cart the goods out of the port. That is why ships are stacked up at the ports now. The system for unloading those ships had atrophied during the pandemic, so it is now over-capacity. This leads to shortages and price disruptions throughout the economy. For example, America has been suffering an aluminum shortage for close to a year.
A good example of how throwing wrenches into the system has unpredictable long term effects is the automobile industry. When the government shut down the country, the travel industry was flattened. The car rental firms did the prudent thing. They liquidated their car fleets. After all, if you make your money renting cars and no one is renting cars, those cars are direct hits to the bottom line. In order to weather the storm, they sold off their fleets and furloughed their staff.
The trouble is a big source of used cars is the car rental industry. They get cars on programs from the manufacturers. They can be three, six or nine month programs where the company takes the new cars for a monthly fee and then returns them to the manufacturers after the term of the program. Those cars end up in the new car dealer lots as discounted used cars. Look around the car lots in America and what you see is lots of empty spaces where cars used to sit.
Once things opened up, the car rental companies went looking for cars, so they went to the used car auctions. Other shortages have made it impossible for the manufacturers to get cars to their own dealers, much less supply program cars to the rental fleets, so that left the used car market. Used car prices are now spiking to record levels because the supply chain is a mess. It will take years for this to normalize, and the cost will be in the tens of billions.
Of course, everyone who buys food has noticed that food is suddenly much more expensive and there are weird shortages. Like everything else, the broken supply chain is the main culprit. Those trucking companies suddenly put out of business by government fiat did not sit around waiting to open up again. They fired their staff, sold off their trucks and found other ways to survive. Rebuilding the many small links of the supply chain will take years and show up in higher food prices.
In a modern liberal democracy, every event requires a response, and every response requires a response and so on. The smallest pebble tossed into the water can potentially result in a flood. In this context it means government jumping in to mitigate the consequences of their fix for something else they broke. Inflation will get calls for more spending, which will get more inflation. The central banks will then try to redirect that inflation from goods to assets.
In other words, the shutdowns have created a dynamic of chaos that will take years to settle out, assuming no further shocks. The Biden administration is promising another meteor strike with their Build Back Better nonsense. You see, they broke everything and now see it as a chance to remake the world in their image. When crazy stupid people want to try to make the world, the only thing that can follow is chaos. We may be at the cusp of an age of unimaginable economic madness.
This is a good example of something said by Will Durant. “Out of every hundred new ideas ninety-nine or more will probably be inferior to the traditional responses which they propose to replace. No one man, however brilliant or well-informed, can come in one lifetime to such fullness of understanding as to safely judge and dismiss the customs or institutions of his society, for those are the wisdom of generations after centuries of experiment in the laboratory of history.”
In the fullness of time, after the West is a ruin of its own making, this age will be remembered as a gross and sustained violation of that sentiment. If over the last thirty years the people in charge had done nothing but entertain themselves with their toys, none of this would be happening. Instead, they kept trying to prove nature wrong and overturn the wisdom of ages. Reality does not take kindly to this amount of abuse, so there will be consequences.
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With regards to the supply chain, there is an app called “MarineTraffic” available. There is a free version, so if you’re so inclined, you can see where every vessel on the water is, around the globe. Let’s just say there are more ships sitting on their hands on the west and east coast, than are being unloaded. For 0.99, you can get complete descriptions of every ship, tug and yacht. It’s amazing to see just how much activity there is in the chain.
8
Just wait until those poor Australians are finally allowed to get back in their cars after they’ve been sitting idle for 18 months. The batteries will be dead and the fuel lines will be clogged. Mice will be all over the engine compartment chewing away at any and everything. Bird nests will show up in the grill. Then the repair garages will be overwhelmed with business and who knows how long that will take to straighten out.
5
I am in the automotive business and Z is correct regarding the used car market. We have no inventory. All of my friends in the business are reporting the same thing happening at their dealerships. I am warning everyone I know to avoid buying used right now as many/most are selling at prices just below new models.
The past year we have seen all of the repairs described in the above post (well no bird nests, yet) Rusted brakes, dead batteries and MICE! Tons of mouse damaged cars. I have personally totalled several this year. In most cases these are repaired or replaced under insurance claims. So, again, the costs have been socialized.
6
http://www.shipspotting.com/ais/index.php
a global map showing the real-time position of nearly every boat & ship
3
Unsurprisingly, all the yachts appear to be piled up in Miami and Monaco.
2
it would appear that everything done to date was solely to get trump out of office so the grift and corruption could continue unabated.
13
They are much more ambitious than that.
There are a bunch of threads being interwoven, some pop up then vanish for a while, others are top of mind for quite a continuous time.
In no particular order,.
Universal basic income.
Central bank digital currency.
Abolition of cash
Universal ID’s
(I had links to all of these but comment was then deemed to be spam and couldn’t be posted)
Where we are.
Corona leads to vaccine leads to vaccine passport.
What’s next (may be introduced in this order)
Central bank digital currency is used to distribute universal basic income.
UBI can be accessed/spent via universal digital passport (phone app) requires user to be full vaxxed.
Central bank can control spending in real time. In Sydney Australia, for example you can only travel within 5 km of your home.
https://www.sbs.com.au/news/interactive-map-what-is-5km-from-your-sydney-home/1ac39682-81c7-4ccb-ba0a-a705895c9d40
Central bank could prevent all spending outside that limit.
So where it goes.
You are a serf, owned by the state, travel where you are allowed. Can purchase only approved items.
You can be financially terminated at will.
You will own nothing. You will be happy.
3
Interesting to see how the sportsball heroes will react to the NBA telling them, no jab, no pay. Hopefully some of them will stand tall.
4
The NBA has already caved on the vaccine. They are requiring it for everyone but the players because the players union wouldn’t agree to it. Several players have made comments saying, “why would I take a vaccine with even a small risk of side effects when I already had Covid and recovered quickly?”
5
They’ll never get this right, they’re just “firemen” running around either burning crap down that they don’t understand or, like with the UK CO2 imbroglio, trying to put out their fires before the flames consume them as well.
4
With the sky rocketing natural gas and electrical prices here and especially in Europe we may see a cascade of events unfold the elites will have no answer for. They have set events into motion they have no understanding of and no way to control. Interesting times we live in.
10
Listen. You promised me WW3 with Iran, a pandemic, ADE and now economic collapse.
Stop blueballing me already.
4
The damage to the supply chains, as bad as it is, is at least measurable, and shows up within a year or so of the dumb, crazy action by the rulers. What are the long-term effects on children who’ve spent now decent chunk of their childhood wearing masks and being told to be six feet apart from each other or (Elisabeth Warren voice) “people will die!” How about the hit to what’s left of our social capital after Fauci got caught financing this insanity? Who would listen to the CDC now if a real pandemic or crisis came along, as it very well could? Small business owners have committed suicide, businesses that have existed for generations have tanked. The best our rulers can come up with right now is to point and splutter, “Didn’t Trump suck? Look at how crazy he was!” Pointing and spluttering at republicans usually works (they got good mileage out of Palin), but they really can’t distract people with that technique anymore.
11
Sure they can. They do it every day.
2
Elsewhere herein I opined that during the Great Depression, folks put their faith in the government [e.g. FDRs idiocy got him elected 4x]. I don’t think that naivete has diminished one iota since then, if anything, Blind Faith is not just a band but the modus operandi of the true believers.
1
Broken people at two extreme parts of the spectrum will form, Permanent terrified sheep on one side and murderous psychopaths on the other.
My favorite was when the American Association of Pediatrics tried saying with a straight face that there’s no evidence wearing a mask around children inhibits language development.
2
Chesterton’s Fence
The hubris and stupidity of today’s leaders (actually, most of our leaders since the 1960s) is stunning. On every issue, but, especially race and culture, they simply assume that the generations that came before them were either idiots or evil. It never dawns on rulers that maybe, just maybe, those who came before them set up the rules for good reasons based on lessons learned over hundreds, if not thousands of years.
Our rulers have the self-awareness and thoughtfulness of a teenager.
15
Teenager?
They are more like psychotic toddlers.
3
That’s the boomer demographic for you. They grew up thinking their parents were idiots. As kids we were not allowed to notice that the boomers were idiots too.
And so it goes, we fail to see it in ourselves too.
Thank gawd the millennials were raised right and will save us all.
😉
4
Read any modern history book taught in schools and you’ll see a pretty simple theme:
American Settlers – Morons
Medieval People – Morons
American Indians – Victims
American Blacks – Victims
Enlightenment Philosophers – Smart, because they believed in Universalism
Civil rights activists – Even smarter than enlightenment philosophers
Note they are incorporating less literature from these bad times, largely because modern students are less and less capable of understanding it, but trust us, they were morons.
It’s a concerted general push, along with credentialism, to think in terms of Whig history where the next generation is always more enlightened than the previous.
2
I’d add these groups to the list:
Ancient Romans – Morons
Ancient Greeks – Morons
Aztecs, Mayans, Olmecs, etc – Delicate and thoughtful mathematicians and astronomers
1
Don’t forget the individual heroes like Martin Luther King, Sacajawea, and Harriet Tubman.
But the most important thing in the world is the assault on “Our Democracy” ™ by these evil rioters at the Capitol, our sacred shrine of “Our Democracy” ™.
4
In primis [sorry Derb]: “Humans have figured out to tough out these naturally occurring events.” Very true, but the feminization of society today has eradicated the noun “toughness” from the working vocabulary and practice.
Secundo loco, Durant’s maxim is further proof–if any were needed–that the 80 for the 20 innovations in supply and demand were worked out many generations ago. All of our tinkering with those well-established “institutions and customs” comes at high cost and increasingly marginal returns. Another shock to the system, likely engineered by our masters as a fix to the damage they’ve wrought, might be enough to collapse the house of cards back to something more manageable. That process will not be pretty.
4
The microprocessor revolution ushered in a genuine revolution in the supply chain. Not only do goods and service flow much faster, they flow more accurately and adjust more quickly. One reason we did not have riots last year over the lock downs is people got food and entertainments. Fifty years ago lockdowns would have meant hungry mobs burning state capitols and hanging the politicians.
There are limits and we are bumping up against those limits.
7
Just-in-time supply theory doesn’t work too well under such scenarios. Also, the relative tranquility during the Great Depression would seem to militate against your position that hunger and a dearth of entertainments inevitably causes riots and civil unrest. Many were too busy scrambling to survive and didn’t have the wherewithal to engage in street politics. There was still faith in government solving social problems. Even now, as the scales fall from the eyes of many, that misplaced faith might be even stronger than it was in the 30s. We shall see.
2
“The microprocessor revolution ushered in a genuine revolution in the supply chain. Not only do goods and service flow much faster, they flow more accurately and adjust more quickly.”
My experience as of late, regarding big box chains and their websites has been as follows. They show something in inventory. You order it. It fails to arrive because it never was in inventory. You get some lame apology email.
Not from mom and pops, either. Advance Auto Parts is a major culprit. They now stock a whopping ONE of many parts once common. Worse, their website states “perfect fit” for your car, then … it is not a fit at all. Turns out the one that fits is not in stock, or is much more expensive. I manage a small fleet and can tell you large chain auto parts are a mess and their counter people are apathetic, knowing how bad things are.
Whatever “revolution” took place seems to be Covidover.
2
Just in time inventory, taken to its logical limit, makes the system fragile. This is why we have so many problems and will have many more problems. The logic of the system was not built to handle a lock down and a restart.
3
Build Back Better may be the key to understanding all of this. Various high-profile figures around the globe keep repeating that creepy mantra. Did all these top puppets just suddenly come up with the same slogan? No. It was supplied to them by the World Economic Forum. What do widespread invocations of BBB signify? That there is a well-coordinated global plot afoot. The most visible puppets in the world appear to be on the same page with one another.
What if economic madness and decline constitute a feature rather than a bug? What if one of several purposes behind the scamdemic campaign of endless fear porn propaganda is to capsize The West? What if the leading bankers, big tech players, and other globalist billionaires are intentionally pulling the plug on our civilization so as to further enrich and empower themselves?
3
Build Back Better, the Great Reset, Agenda 21…..what amazes me is how open the global elites are about this stuff. The Great Reset was the cover story in Time magazine back in November. “You will own nothing, and be happy.” And then BlackRock has been buying thousands of houses. When they openly say what their plan is, maybe we should take them seriously?
4
Unless you are a supervillain that’s lives on an uncharted island under an extinct volcano… very risky play by the 1%. When worlds burn, the former elite often burns with them.
2
1
The WEF has people everywhere in politics, media, and academia around the world. It’s not even secret.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TG6R36bkgs
1
What if economic madness and decline constitute a feature rather than a bug?
Yes. If you want to create a new world order, you have to smash the old one first.
I see no possible innocent explanation for all these assaults on the Western economies, no insanity defense. Britain sits on at least a thousand trillion cubic feet of natural gas, but every time there’s a cold winter, their geezers die like flies because they can’t afford heating their homes.
1
a thousand trillion cubic feet of natural gas
Enough to power Britain for a century.
“What if the leading bankers, big tech players, and other globalist billionaires are intentionally pulling the plug on our civilization so as to further enrich and empower themselves?”
It would be akin to demolishing your factory so you can be richer than your workers. The BBB crowd has two types of members: bad-faith actors who hate humanity, and dupes. Most are dupes. That the modern economy is based on financial exploitation rather than innovation proves that our leaders unimaginative dullards of the sort that are easily swayed by misanthropic conmen.
1
Yes and no, maybe.
People forget how robust and flexible the economy is. Hate Trump all you want, but he could turn this around today. Open things up, make the market fair to invest in, and put the brakes on the Free Chit Army.
The modern economy is all about speed. Everyone has a CNC. Everyone has 3D printers, robotics, and the means to turn on the economic fire hose full blast. Most shortages will be of extremely short duration.
The big question is our meddling govt. Not gonna fedpoast today… but something has to be done about that dumpster fire in our ruling elite before anything can get done. You can’t do business with these guys in charge. The fix is actually pretty simple if you think about it…
5
3
Another broken supply chain this morning:
“The CDC demands, err, recommends that all pregnant women get vaccinated.”
That’s the same brilliant logic applied to the public employees’ pension/pay crisis.
They’re union, so it seems you can’t lay them off or cut benefits, but you sure can fire them for heresy.
Now these geniuses aren’t just borrowing from the future, they’re borrowing from future payers that won’t even exist.
1
Semi-OT:
I’m surprised this didn’t get mentioned on the, “Female Trouble,” post, but it appears that Governor Noem is reverting to type and working the Kamala plan for a VP bid:
https://amgreatness.com/2021/09/28/kristi-noem-shows-why-republicans-cant-have-nice-things/
1
How ironic that despite all their best efforts to provoke a real-life “insurrection” by setting social groups at each other’s throats, what will really kick it off is good ol’ supply and demand. Folks on our side have often wondered what would happen if the EBT cards stopped working for a day or two down in the ‘hood. We might well be about to find out, closely followed by whatever happens when the BoBos out in the ‘burbs can’t get fed, either. No, Snowflake, a good lecture on “intersectionality” can’t unload a ship’ nor can a few stern tweets about “privilege” get a truck from point A to point B. You can handwave away sexual dimorphism if you like, but you can’t handwave away tires on pavement… or the lack thereof.
Isn’t it ironic, dontcha think? Somewhere in the wilds of the Canadian outback, Alanis Morrisette is weeping salty tears of joy.
2
“Reality does not take kindly to this amount of abuse, so there will be consequences.”
No doubt. If I were younger—I am 68—and “kindler and gentler” than I am today, I would wish that the consequences would happen immediately so that I could do all I could to help my fellow man survive and overcome. Now I want the collapse to delay itself until I am long gone—which might be this afternoon or 30 more years.
I would rather not enter another ‘Great Depression’ as an elderly gentleman living on Teacher Retirement and Social Security. I have lots of ammo, which might mitigate things a bit.
3
Oh, and a special thanks for today’s post, I’ve only done a bit of container drayage, mostly rail. Port freight and longshoring are yet another area I’m woefully ignorant in.