Thanks as always to Bacon Time, Pirate’s Cove, The Other McCain and Whores and Ale for the Rule Five links! Thanks also to long-time blogger pals over at The Daley Gator for the mention of last week’s links post.
Now then: Unless you’ve been unconscious for the last few months, you’ll know that there is a big supply-chain crisis ongoing. Turns out it may be worse than we thought. Excerpt:
Cargo ships anchored off California and New York, and in rail yards and on trucking routes, shipping consumer goods are incredibly backlogged due to a lack of manpower and pandemic restrictions to unload the goods. And now, there are warnings that the supply chain may be on the brink of collapse.
Shipping ports which normally only had one or two ships in dock waiting to be unloaded prior to the pandemic now have dozens lined up and waited to be unloaded for up to four weeks, slowing the whole chain. In Los Angeles and Long Beach, as many as 73 vessels were waiting to be unloaded last month. The bottlenecks at the ports are also impacted railways and trucking. In Chicago — that has one of the largest rail yards — it was at one point backed up for 25 miles.
At APM Terminals, a 484-acre facility boasts 12 miles of railroad tracks in Los Angeles, and the largest container site in the Western Hemisphere, Steven Trombley, the facility’s managing director, struggles to keep up with the increased influx of products and a shortage of workers.
‘It’s a headache. Cargo is sitting here longer than planned,’ Trombley told The Washington Post. ‘If I don’t get the cargo moving, then the next ship is not going to have space.’
At the facility, containers set to travel by rail commonly sit dockside for weeks, in contrast to just days, prior the pandemic.
Across from the headquarters building, trucks sit parked across a backlog of containers stacked 50 feet high, waiting to be driven east.
That’s caused prices to soar, for everything in the supply chain which, of course, will be passed on to the consumers.
Pre-Covid, the cost of shipping a container from China to the US’s West Coast was roughly $1,300. Today, that cost has risen exponentially, with the cost of transporting one container being roughly $35,000.
And the right to use these containers goes the highest bidder, hurting a host of retailers, especially small ones.
These retailers cannot afford the increasing cost to transport their inventory, and many have gone out of business.
One has to wonder if this is feature or bug. If you wanted to deliberately screw up the nation’s supply chains, and in so doing bring the economy into a serious crisis – we’re talking Great Depression-style crisis – you could hardly do any better than to follow the policy decisions made by President Biden(‘s handlers.)
This is kakistocracy in action, True Believers – government by the worst, and in most cases, the most stupid. We have a bumbling, senile old fool in the Imperial Mansion, a cackling harpy as the back-up, and Congress is for the most part composed of morons, lickspittles, mendicants, charlatans, fraudsters and nincompoops.
We could solve a lot of the supply chain problems right now by removing at least the most onerous of the Kung Flu restrictions and stop incentivizing people to stay home and not work. But that won’t happen this year or next. That’s more than enough time to wreck an economy.
