The supply-chain crunch appears to have already peaked in the U.S.

[RandySF]

Link to tweet

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Bloomberg Opinion
@bopinion
Good news: The supply-chain crunch appears to have already peaked in the U.S.

Evidence keeps piling up to suggest that the U.S. is slowly but surely making progress in easing freight congestion and supply shortages

[Diablo del sol]

1. Been at Huntington Beach the last two Saturdays.

Last week the backup went to the HB Pier. This week at least a mile improvement. Couple of months ago, all the way to Newport Beach, so another five miles.

That being said, the port situation is improving. Supply Chain issue will take years to correct. Until MFG is moved back to North America, we will deal with interruptions.

[Amishman]

19. bringing manufacturing back onshore solves a lot of issues

Not the least of which is helping fight climate change.

New modern (and heavily automated) manufacturing facilities are a lot greener, plus you are avoiding all the carbon release from shipping the finished goods halfway around the world.

Perhaps a future idea would be a carbon tax on imports, based on how the goods were made and how far they travelled?

[elleng]

2. Sounds good.

[denbot]

3. There are huge backups at trucking terminals.

Mostly major players like Roadtex, DHL etc., Me thinks it's intentional...

[larwdem]

4. Me to

corporation are going after Biden thy want more tax breaks

[calimary]

5. The freight trains are running through town again, up here.

It was awfully quiet for awhile, though.

[Shanti Shanti Shanti]

6. Black Friday shopping splurge hasnt even hit yet! This guy is whistling....

[Amishman]

20. For those goods to be available on Friday, they would have needed to have been unloaded long ago

Black Friday consumer inventory would have been unloaded weeks or months ago

[Ron Green]

7. We spend money we don't have to buy things we don't need,

to make impressions that won’t last on people we don’t care about.

[Wanderlust988]

8. I've found everything I need at the grocery stores for Thanksgiving

And they have ample supply, at least here in central Kentucky. I don't know how it is in the rest of the country. I've been to Wal-Mart, Kroger, and Meijer and found ample supplies of everything I've needed. And Meijer had tons of turkeys. I wonder if the media is just over-hyping stuff to make Biden look bad.

[spinbaby]

9. I've noticed odd spot shortages

There were no turkey breasts, so I bought a whole turkey. Then a local grocery suddenly had a freezer full. Cat food has been an ongoing problem, as has my son’s favorite brand of iced tea. One week there was no romaine lettuce anywhere. Walmart is the only store in town that has unsweetened coconut.

Overall, most things are stocked in most places, but one tends to notice when that one thing is out of stock.

[Deminpenn]

15. Seconded on the cat food, but it's canned food

like Fancy Feast. I wonder if that's related to the aluminum can shortage, too, since cat food is all made in the US and dry food has been on the shelves throughout.

For awhile cat treats were seemed to be stocked out a lot, but not so bad now.

[Sherman A1]

29. Even before the advent of TFGs complete bungling of the pandemic

There have been spot outages in the grocery business and others. A truck misses a delivery window, a computer crashes in an ordering or receiving system, a manufacturer runs out of packaging or an ingredient, a veteran of the business retires and take their institutional memory with them leaving an inexperienced replacement to figure it out, a power failure somewhere and on and on. I’ve seen all those lead to bare shelves at the stores I worked at both during the holidays and other times.

Best one was the produce warehouse crew all called in sick to go deer hunting one year in early November. The loads that did get out were very late that Saturday.

[Slammer]

27. Kroger/Walmart

Here, in a major metro area, there was less supply of most things (like less than half the display space of frozen turkeys) and no supply of a few things like fresh cranberries. There were no turkeys at all which were larger than 18 pounds, which isn't a problem this time since we're not having a large family gathering this year. But in non-Covid years, getting a turkey less than 24 pounds would be a problem.

And everything cost 30-50% more than last year except for frozen diced potatoes.

I didn't wait until the last minute to do my Thanksgiving food shopping. But I'd guess that people who waited until this weekend or later will be scrambling to find what they need.

[traitorsgalore]

10. Supply chain of what? Poorly/slave labor-made crap that nobody needs

This is the corrupt outsourcing markets collapsing on themselves from top to bottom.

[durablend]

12. Unfortunately *everything* is made overseas

It's not just the crap nobody needs...just check the pet food aisle at your local store to see.

[Klaralven]

11. When the backed up goods arrive, there should be great sales during January

[SouthernDem4ever]

31. so true. Wait until January to do your Xmas shopping

you'll save a LOT of money.

[Marthe48]

13. could this be another anti-democracy ploy?

The enemies of our state let Covid-19 run rampant, allowed racism and and white supremacy to rise, and attack voting rights.
I was talking to my daughter last night, and we both agreed that so far, we see price hikes, but we are getting the things on our shopping lists.

I wondered if the bottlenecks and shortages, and inflation isn't being encouraged by the traitors? I have 6 million Deutsche marks from 1923. I learned in history that inflation in Germany between WWI and WWII was another cause of the rise of hitler. So that 6 million marks wouldn't have been enough to buy a loaf of bread. So I couldn't help wondering if this is another weapon to kill off our democracy.

[hay rick]

14. Whoa! Can't have good news interfering with the Fox News Biden Disaster narrative.

Back to the "border crisis" we go.

[BannonsLiver]

22. Oh it wasn't just FOX

There have been people here making a big to-do about not being able to find every flavor of Oreos they wanted, and other equally irritating whines.

[hay rick]

23. Our media "allies" have been willing boosters of the supply chain crisis narrative.

The universal hand-wringing over the Build Back Better price tag is another example of media complicity. Curiously, all price tag concerns evaporate when the bloated military budget surfaces for a nanosecond of media examination.

[TheAnnoyedAgnostic]

25. So much this.

RW/MSM media are trying to make every thing into a "crisis".

[lame54]

16. Thanks Biden/Buttigieg

[Deminpenn]

17. Yep

nt

[Vinca]

18. Today I went grocery shopping for the week and felt as if I'd won the lottery.

THREE BOXES OF CAT LITTER DEODORANT!

[BannonsLiver]

21. Good

I was growing tired of the super whiny posts which unintentionally amplify GOP talking points.

[Dopers_Greed]

24. The damage is already done

The RW (successfully) pinned it on Biden

[Metaphorical]

26. Supply Chain

I don't believe the deliberate supply chain sabotage narrative here, any more than I believe the exaggerated GOP supply chain woes. If we're peaking before Christmas (and a lot of anecdotal evidence suggests we are), then supply chain issues will likely be a distant memory by this summer, and with it, the whole inflation wringing of hands.

Milton Friedman was the architect of the particular belief that inflation is a monetary issue brought about by too much government spending, which has been a GOP talking point for decades. The reality is that inflation is almost invariably due to one of two reasons: population growth (when money has to be added into the economy to account for new spenders), or supply chain issues. Government spending has, as near as I can tell, has very little to do with it.

The one caveat to this is hyperinflation, which comes when confidence in a government collapses in the lead-up to civil war, which is basically what happened to Germany after WWI. The Weimar hyperinflation event started out as a supply chain collapse in the wake of the stringent capital constraints placed on post-World War I Germany by the Treaty of Versailles, then was exacerbated when there was a massive capital flight of the wealthy as the Republic tried to tax them to keep the government going.

I'm not sure a Weimar-type hyperinflation event would even be possible today, at least for the US.

[Slammer]

28. Friedman

In Friedman's life history, government "overspending" was accompanied by the government printing excessive amounts of money which it used to cover the government outlays.

Friedman wasn't able to always mentally separate "government spending" from "government printing more money"...and his followers rarely attempt to.

If the increase of the rate in government intake of revenues are matching the rate of increase in government spending, there shouldn't be long-term inflation (absent a shortage of goods caused by supply chain issues or other such temporary problems).

Or if the government is borrowing the money to cover the excess spending, there shouldn't be long-term inflation.

But honestly, we're reaching such high levels of debt that I think we'd be better off in the long run to start printing money to cover our yearly deficits and a small part of the debt that's rolling over. If we do that for the next twenty years, we might be able to get out of this debt mess.

We're getting to a point that we're paying a ridiculous percentage of government revenues just to cover the interest on our debt PLUS the government is spending more than double each year than the government is taking in for revenue.

I don't think we can continue borrowing that much additional money each year (on top of what we're already borrowing) indefinitely. And we sure can't continue to pay more and more of our government revenues each year out in interest payments while we're skimping on all our other spending priorities.

And Lord help us if interest rates go up to anywhere near historic norms while our debt is this high....

/ramble

[SouthernDem4ever]

30. The shipping companies don't care they are making $30,000 per container

as opposed to $3000 last year. Crooks!