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| Economy |
| Three bizarre reasons why inflation is here to stay |
| 2021-10-12 |
| [Sovereign Man] When I was about five years old in the early 1980s, my dad brought home our first computer. I’ll never forget it— it was an clunky IBM with a tiny, orange, monochromatic monitor, and dual floppy disks. It had 640 kilobytes of RAM, and no hard disk. I loved it. With that computer I learned how to program, how to navigate a command-line interface, how to design algorithms, and how to solve constant problems... because it was ridiculously buggy and would break down all the time. It was also painfully slow. The boot-up process could easily take an hour, from the time I flipped on the power switch, to the time I saw the ’DOS prompt’. Sometimes I think that computer is a great metaphor for the global economy. Turning it off is nothing; you flip the switch and the power goes off. But starting it back up again takes a long time. And the process isn’t so smooth— sometimes it crashes during bootup. Last March when the Great Plague was upon us, nearly every industry, in nearly every country in the world, practically shut down. And many businesses went bust, never to return. Eighteen months later businesses have largely reopened. But like my old computer, the reboot process has been riddled with critical errors and system failures. For example, right now there are countless businesses in industries from retail to manufacturing that are experiencing severe labor shortages. Supply chains around the world are breaking down, resulting in product shortages and major transportation bottlenecks. The end result of this dumpster fire is that prices are soaring. And I wanted to spend some time today connecting the dots to help explain some of these important trends. Let’s go back to last March again when everything shut down. You probably recall that dozens of large companies declared bankruptcy, like Nieman Marcus, GNC, JC Penny, etc. But there were other companies that went bust which most people have probably never heard of. They were in more mundane, less sexy industries... like corrugated paper and wood pulp. Yet while their demise was hardly noticed, it turns out they would have a significant impact on the global economy. |
| Posted by:Besoeker |
| #8 Shortages at the same time the Dims are bringing in 100's of thousands of more people. |
| Posted by: Blackbeard Barnsmell6454 2021-10-12 23:39 |
| #7 Inflation feeds the middleman. |
| Posted by: Skidmark 2021-10-12 23:12 |
| #6 I just popped in to my local Kroger grocery to get a few things. A three pound chub of 80% lean ground beef, which I recall costing about $6 on sale a year ago, is now $9.99 on sale against a regular price of $13.49. |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2021-10-12 13:55 |
| #5 Very surprising. Not at all what we expected. Shocked, I tell you. |
| Posted by: Jay Powell King of the Clueless 2021-10-12 10:48 |
| #4 Bizarre. I was assured by the smartest that businesses just go into some sort of hibernation to emerge seven years later and reproduce. And if they don't, 'eff them, they didn't deserve to exist anyways. You want to see fucked, wait until the cattle producers get ran out of town. We're talking trucking, grain producers, all the industries which rely on the harvest of cows and that is much more than cheeseburgers and baseball gloves, the explosion of food prices due to decreased supply, and that includes your pet foods too which may lead to the re-imagining, to use the current parlance, of what a pet is. It isn't a trade where 6 months in an intense vo-tech re-trains a generation back into cattle raising because that was a mistake. We're talking at least ten years for an 'emergency turnaround'. Better learn to eat bugs. They will be everywhere and just as soon eat you. Meanwhile, if you are a congressional trillionaire, you'll get your wagyu Swedish meatballs all over your face. |
| Posted by: swksvolFF 2021-10-12 10:38 |
| #3 Cause socialist don't really understand any economies other than their cherished 'command economy'. It's not like a light switch you can turn off and turn back on, that's their belief that you can. Europe was shut down 1939-45 and it took them decades before they really recovered. It's going to take a long time to get it going again now, but constant governmental interference, regulating and removing more capital out of the system through higher taxes will delay or obstruct any recovery. |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2021-10-12 07:40 |
| #2 Comparing some old notes for my 1991 original Test Bed. I was reminded I once paid $299 for a Seagate ST-251 40MB HD and I can now purchase a 8TB drive for just under $200 today. My Kmart C-64 put me back over $250, and my Leading Edge Model D PC 512kb (DOS2.11) with monitor at SAM Wholesale was $1195. Now I can purchase basic LCD HP laptops with 4gb ram starting around $240. But I have also noticed double digit percentage increases over the last few months at Wally World. For every thing from bread, can goods, meats, common size clothing and Shoes. I am seeing a more empty Shelf spaces at the 4 area stores we wonder around in each week. |
| Posted by: NN2N1 2021-10-12 07:40 |
| #1 Sometimes I think that computer is a great metaphor for the global economy. Except the computer had 64 bits of floating point precision. |
| Posted by: Skidmark 2021-10-12 06:56 |