Supply Chains

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Re: Supply Chains

Postby drstrangelove » Fri Apr 08, 2022 7:49 pm

Ukraine War Drives Food Prices to Record High
Freshly-baked bread in Tunis, Tunisia, last month.Photo: anis mili/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
By Alistair MacDonald
and Patrick Thomas
Apr. 8, 2022 1:55 pm ET

Global food prices hit a new record high in March, the United Nations said Friday, as the war in Ukraine threatens food shortages in some of the world’s poorest countries and deeper inflation challenges for Western food manufacturers.

The war has disrupted Ukraine’s prodigious exports of wheat, sunflower oil and other produce, and impacted food exports from Russia, upending a part of the world that has become increasingly important to feeding a growing global population.

The absence of produce from the region is also lifting the prices of commodities produced elsewhere as countries and companies seek alternatives to their usual supplies. Higher grain prices in particular also threaten a knock-on impact on beef and other meat as producers rely heavily on grain to feed livestock and poultry. The higher costs mean some of the largest food companies in the U.S. will likely continue to raise prices on consumers for products from cereal to deli meat, analysts say.

The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization said Friday that its Food Prices Index—a measure of the most commonly traded food commodities—rose 12.7% to hit 159.3 points last month, up from a previous high of 141.4 in February. The March reading is the highest since the index was developed in 1990.

Much of the rise has been driven by higher grain prices. The FAO’s cereal index rose more than 17% month-on-month, boosted by uncertainty surrounding grain exports from Russia and Ukraine. The two countries accounted for 30% of global wheat exports and 20% of corn over the last three years, the FAO said. They also produce a large proportion of the world’s sunflower oil, eggs and other agricultural produce.

The FAO also said vegetable oil prices were up 23.2%, sugar had gained 6.7% and meat was 4.8% higher.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has closed off the Black Sea ports that funnel much of the produce grown in the region around the world. Experts fear the impact of the war could be long lasting, as the fighting churns up farmland, smashes infrastructure and deprives farmers of fuel and fertilizers, which will likely reduce future crop yields. Many workers have also left the country or joined the fight.

Andrii Gogolov, whose farm is in a part of southern Ukraine currently occupied by Russian forces, said he is unable to export produce at the moment, including 500 metric tons of soya he has in his warehouse. He also said he probably wouldn’t grow any corn this season because of damage to the local irrigation system.

“This is a disaster for Ukrainian farming,” he said.

The Ukrainian government predicts that there will be 25% less land planted this spring than usual, though some experts say that forecast is too optimistic. “If it is only 25% I would be amazed,” said John Rich, executive chairman of MHP, one of Ukraine’s biggest grain exporters.

Higher agricultural commodity prices are a windfall for big agricultural companies like Bunge Ltd. and Archer Daniels Midland Co. that buy and transport crops, analysts say.

U.S. farmer cooperative CHS Inc., which has a large grain-trading business, on Wednesday said it swung back to profit in the quarter ended Feb. 28. “Strong demand combined with global market volatility contributed to higher earnings,” said Chief Executive Jay Debertin.

Shares of ADM and Bunge are up about 40% and 25%, respectively, this year.

For food producers that rely on grain and meat as ingredients for their products, though, higher commodity prices add to existing inflationary pressures amid rising costs for fuel and labor.

Conagra Brands Inc. said on Thursday that surging inflation in ingredients and trucking is pushing the company to raise prices again.

The Chicago-based food manufacturer, which makes Healthy Choice frozen meals and Slim Jim meat sticks, has already lifted prices for its products over the past year, citing higher supply-chain costs arising from the Covid-19 pandemic and, more recently, Russia’s invasion.

Conagra said persistent inflation had led the company to lower its earnings expectations for its fiscal year that ends in May.

So far, though, Conagra said U.S. shoppers don’t appear deterred by higher prices for its products. The company said its sales volumes at supermarkets have remained strong, but that that isn’t the case for some of its competitors.

Meat companies from Tyson Foods Inc., the biggest U.S. meat processor by sales, to Hormel Foods Corp., the maker of Spam, have also so far said strong demand has allowed them to pass along higher costs to their customers.

However, meat and poultry processors will be challenged to pass on all of the more recent higher costs to consumers, according to analysts at Rabobank, a major agricultural lender.

Higher food prices are most likely to have an outsize impact on the world’s developing countries, analysts say. Egypt and Indonesia are the largest buyers of Ukrainian wheat, each accounting for more than 15% of Ukraine’s wheat exports, according to data from Trade Data Monitor.

Recent increases come at a time of already high food-cost inflation, given disruptions related to the Covid-19 pandemic and poor harvests in the U.S., Canada and other countries.

The Iraqi government has already released some of its strategic reserves of wheat amid public protests and demands for easing of taxes on food imports.

The impact of higher prices is also becoming clear in Yemen, said Yasmin Faruki, a Washington, D.C.-based policy adviser at nonprofit Mercy Corps who recently visited the country.

The price of a 50-kilogram bag of flour is up 42% from a month ago, while the price of cooking oil is up 36% over the period, she said. Yemen is one of the 10 biggest importers of wheat from Ukraine and Russia, buying around 1.5 million metric tons of the grain from those two nations a year, according to Mercy Corps.

“People are now having to split already limited amounts of food,” Ms. Faruki said.

- https://www.wsj.com/articles/ukraine-wa ... 1649440528

Ukraine adds to Yemen's woes as hunger emergency spreads and lack of funding leaves millions vulnerable
“We are looking at a seismic hunger crisis if we do not step up now. Unless we receive immediate funds, hungry people will lose assistance right at the time they need it most,” said WFP Executive Director David Beasley on the eve of a high-level pledging event for Yemen. “Funding for Yemen has never reached this point. We have no choice but to take food from the hungry to feed the starving.

WFP was forced to reduce food rations for eight million people at the beginning of the year due to a shortage of funds. For now, five million people who are at immediate risk of slipping into famine conditions have continued to receive a full food ration. But unless new funds arrive further reductions will be unavoidable.

- https://www.wfp.org/news/ukraine-adds-y ... vulnerable

Saudi appeasement for oil price relief.

NYTimes also did an episode on food supply recently in its daily brainwash of the professional classes.

Alloneword already linked to Christian's youtube, but he is an excellent resource on this stuff, and most importantly, his channel and particular interest in food supply chain collapse predates the pandemic, which has seen a saturation of opportunists trying to build an audience on clickbait conspiracy theory. He also offers a hopeful and simple solution anyone can do at the individual or community level. Grow a garden. He interviews the types of people urbanites like myself are out of touch with but have useful knowledge to impart. He is a devout Christian, isn't preachy, just slips out in when he expresses his conceptualisation of things. But a secular mind can just replace the concept of 'God' with that of 'Nature' and everyone is on the same page from an ethical or practical standpoint.

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Re: Supply Chains

Postby alloneword » Sun Apr 17, 2022 5:50 pm

Any idea what this is about?

CF Industries Holdings, Inc. (NYSE: CF), a leading global manufacturer of hydrogen and nitrogen products, today informed customers it serves by Union Pacific rail lines that railroad-mandated shipping reductions would result in nitrogen fertilizer shipment delays during the spring application season and that it would be unable to accept new rail sales involving Union Pacific for the foreseeable future. The Company understands that it is one of only 30 companies to face these restrictions.

CF Industries ships to customers via Union Pacific rail lines primarily from its Donaldsonville Complex in Louisiana and its Port Neal Complex in Iowa. The rail lines serve key agricultural areas such as Iowa, Illinois, Kansas, Nebraska, Texas and California. Products that will be affected include nitrogen fertilizers such as urea and urea ammonium nitrate (UAN) as well as diesel exhaust fluid (DEF), an emissions control product required for diesel trucks. CF Industries is the largest producer of urea, UAN and DEF in North America, and its Donaldsonville Complex is the largest single production facility for the products in North America.


As 'Natural News' comments:

ten days ago I warned that rail carriers were declaring “force majeure” and halting shipments of grain to dairy herds and other cow herds across America. In that announcement, I also warned that this was an engineered collapse of the food supply, where rail carriers were essentially being ordered to drop certain loads in order to maximize the coming wave of food scarcity and famine...

..This means that Union Pacific is essentially dropping fertilizer shipments and grain shipments all across America. Put another way, America’s food infrastructure is being deliberately shut down.


:shrug:
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Re: Supply Chains

Postby Harvey » Sun Apr 17, 2022 6:06 pm

https://www.marketscreener.com/quote/st ... 3/company/

Image

Berkshire Hathaway is owned by Warren Buffet/Bill Gates?
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Re: Supply Chains

Postby drstrangelove » Sun Apr 17, 2022 7:43 pm

Berkshire Hathaway is controlled by the funds - State Street/Vanguard/BlackRock. Gates has a small stake, but Gates himself is just a philanthropic front for Rockefeller NGO power.

They have to hit certain American heartland states hard, because if you have food, guns, and community you can opt out of any public authority which is blatantly working against your interests. Coastal metropolitan cities are pliant because everything is atomized. No community. No food(that isn't shipped in). No guns. And they've basically been poisoning the American population for over 50 years now with the amount of corn syrup, saturated fats, and other shit put in the food supply. Playing the states off against each other one by one. Red vs blue. Cancel culture, but with food.

Taking away just fertilizer would shrink crop yields by what, 20-30%?
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Re: Supply Chains

Postby Harvey » Sun Apr 17, 2022 10:00 pm

Makes sense.
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Re: Supply Chains

Postby Joe Hillshoist » Tue Apr 19, 2022 4:59 am

alloneword » 18 Apr 2022 07:50 wrote:Any idea what this is about?

CF Industries Holdings, Inc. (NYSE: CF), a leading global manufacturer of hydrogen and nitrogen products, today informed customers it serves by Union Pacific rail lines that railroad-mandated shipping reductions would result in nitrogen fertilizer shipment delays during the spring application season and that it would be unable to accept new rail sales involving Union Pacific for the foreseeable future. The Company understands that it is one of only 30 companies to face these restrictions.

CF Industries ships to customers via Union Pacific rail lines primarily from its Donaldsonville Complex in Louisiana and its Port Neal Complex in Iowa. The rail lines serve key agricultural areas such as Iowa, Illinois, Kansas, Nebraska, Texas and California. Products that will be affected include nitrogen fertilizers such as urea and urea ammonium nitrate (UAN) as well as diesel exhaust fluid (DEF), an emissions control product required for diesel trucks. CF Industries is the largest producer of urea, UAN and DEF in North America, and its Donaldsonville Complex is the largest single production facility for the products in North America.


As 'Natural News' comments:

ten days ago I warned that rail carriers were declaring “force majeure” and halting shipments of grain to dairy herds and other cow herds across America. In that announcement, I also warned that this was an engineered collapse of the food supply, where rail carriers were essentially being ordered to drop certain loads in order to maximize the coming wave of food scarcity and famine...

..This means that Union Pacific is essentially dropping fertilizer shipments and grain shipments all across America. Put another way, America’s food infrastructure is being deliberately shut down.


:shrug:


It sounds like they don't put enough money into keeping their organisation running properly.

Union Pacific Will Limit Traffic to Clear Clogged Rail Lines

Company to begin metering customers’ railcars after April 18
Railroad has also removed its own cars, added locomotives

By

Thomas Black


Union Pacific Corp. plans to limit customer-owned railcars on its network beginning next week to ease traffic jams that have gummed up the supply chain.

The railroad said in a letter to customers that it would begin metering traffic after April 18 if customers don’t voluntarily reduce their inventory before then. Union Pacific also said it’s removing 2% to 3% of its own railcars and has added 50 locomotives since January with plans to bring on 100 more to help move cars along.

“The operating inventory levels continue to rise on a daily basis,” Kenny Rocker, Union Pacific’s sales and marketing chief, said in the letter published on its website on Monday. “We have already identified and notified those customers who can help us manage the current congestion by reducing their railcar inventories.”

The industry has struggled with soaring freight since the pandemic drove higher demand for goods, choking the nation’s supply chain. The situation prompted the U.S. Surface Transportation Board to call public hearings later this month to hear from all the major railroads on steps to improve network fluidity, citing a broad worker shortage and railroads’ “bare bones” cost cutting.

“The railroads simply do not have a sufficient number of employees,” board Chairman Martin Oberman said in a statement last week.

Union Pacific said in its letter that it has transferred 80 crew members to help in congested areas and has 450 employees in training that will be ready for locomotives in summer.

The moves come after Union Pacific took steps last July to ease a backup in Chicago, where trailers weren’t being unloaded fast enough amid a crush of traffic. The company halted all containers at the time from Los Angeles to Chicago for about a week.

In a new statement, Union Pacific said the latest attempt to meter railcars will help it work through the backlog, echoing the “approach we successfully applied last year with West Coast intermodal traffic.”

Union Pacific shares were little changed at 9:31 a.m. in New York.

— With assistance by Jennifer A Dlouhy


https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles ... rail-lines
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Re: Supply Chains

Postby Belligerent Savant » Thu Apr 21, 2022 8:34 pm

.
Related. Perhaps we should revise the title of this thread to "Supply Chains/Food Shortages"

Belligerent Savant » Thu Apr 21, 2022 1:27 pm wrote:.

Manufacturing shortages. Vile beasts.

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@e_galv

I wonder why there’s no coverage on all the large food processing plants in the US that have blown up recently.
1:56 PM · Apr 21, 2022·

https://twitter.com/e_galv/status/15172 ... lCzAQNA9MA

Image

Strange Trend of Food Processing Plant Fires Appears Across the US

At least sixteen fires have broken out at food processing plants, impacting the nation's supply of beef and poultry


PUBLISHED: APRIL 21, 2022

There has been an outbreak of fires in food processing facilities across the nation in the last six months as food prices soar and supply chains are stressed to their limits.
The fires began showing up regularly in the news after a fire closed a Tyson Foods meat processing plant in Kansas. The location was a primary beef processing location for the company and the U.S. supply chain, providing about 6% of U.S. beef.

After the fire, analysts began speculating that the impact could drive up market prices for meat nationwide. Dan Norcini, part of the beef and poultry trading markets, said the cattle market would likely “respond negatively” to news of the fire. He said the long-term impact would depend on how long the plant stays closed.

Just days later, in August of 2021, the Patak Meat Processing facility burned near Atlanta. The media took notice because the family-owned business is beloved in its community locally, and its products are purchased nationwide.

The fire in Georgia barely had a minor impact on the food supply chain nationwide. But, in September, a fire at JBS USA, a meat processing facility in Nebraska, threatened the meat supply for the entire nation profoundly. The plant reportedly processes about 5% of the nation’s beef, and closure would directly impact the supply chain.

https://timcast.com/news/strange-trend- ... ss-the-us/
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Re: Supply Chains

Postby MacCruiskeen » Fri Apr 22, 2022 7:36 am

The World Catastrophe Wrought by Covid Lockdowns

By Paul Frijters, Gigi Foster, Michael Baker April 20, 2022 Economics, Policy 12 minute read

https://brownstone.org/articles/the-wor ... lockdowns/


Conclusion:

[...]

Will the US and the EU monetary authorities manage to force their populations into using their preferred digital currencies? They will struggle. Capital flight into commodities and ‘safe’ countries, like Scandinavia and Switzerland, can be fought, but only with capital controls in addition to new taxes on commodities as those commodities replace money: taxes on houses, taxes on land, taxes on gold.

That race would cause chaos because many such commodities are highly leveraged. The middle classes in most countries would be financially ruined if they would have to pay high interest rates on their mortgages, or significant recurring taxes on their houses.

Every country that has made the political choice to print money in order to hide the fact that its covid policies have reduced the productive part of the economy, while increasing the government sector by spending on useless control measures and health theatre, now stands at a financial cliff. We fear that major recessions, at the very least, are in store for such countries while their governments get their act together. The possibility of helping those starving and rioting overseas will simply be erased by domestic disaster.

What scapegoats will governments offer for all this? The old chestnuts they already blame: climate change, the Russians, the pandemic, China, internal critics, the unvaccinated, populism, and so on. Anything but themselves.


So far, populations have largely swallowed this story, assisted by Big Tech, Big Pharma, and others that have worked diligently to ensure that people believe the problems are unrelated to current ideology and politics.

That propaganda comes with its own price, because populations that believe it then demand even more forms of self-harm – e.g., more restrictions on travel and trade ‘to save the planet’. All kinds of self-harm are now being bandied about as ‘solutions’, pushed by political elites scrambling to avoid responsibility for their disastrous choices.

The propaganda is powerful, but reality is still slowly intruding into this make-believe world. Increased food and fuel prices, general inflation, reducing services, and economic hardship cannot be painted over, and the limits of money printing have been reached. Such are the fruits in developed nations of the Great Covid Panic, just as famines are its fruits in poor countries.

Civil wars and famines in 2022 are a near certainty for many poor countries, while the West is preoccupied by trying desperately to avoid its date with financial destiny, and is out of money even if it wanted to help.

2022 looks like being a year of reckoning for the covid madness of 2020-2021. We fear the reckoning will involve even larger-scale madness than we have seen so far. The Furies have taken flight.

https://brownstone.org/articles/the-wor ... lockdowns/
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Re: Supply Chains

Postby MacCruiskeen » Sat Apr 23, 2022 11:44 am

Never attribute to incompetence that which is adequately explained by malice, dishonesty and greed.

Armstrong too feels obliged to swing Hanlon's rusty Razor arround a bit ("morons", "mismanagement") before eventually stating the obvious: that the accelerating global collapse is intentional and premeditated, planned and organised, i.e. criminal -- and that the perps will need actual hot war on a massive scale to have any chance of gettiing away with it.

The West Needs WWIII – Martin Armstrong

By Greg Hunter On April 12, 2022 In Market Analysis 208 Comments

Legendary financial and geopolitical cycle analyst Martin Armstrong thinks the New World Order’s so-called “Great Reset” plan for humanity now needs war to try and make it work. It could happen in the next few weeks. Armstrong explains,
“What they are trying to do is deliberately poke the bear. . . . They are increasing the pressure on just about everything under the sun. The West needs World War III. They just need it. The real problem here is they went to negative interest rates in 2014 in Europe. They have been unable to stimulate the economy, and Keynesian economics have completely failed. . . . I would say this is mismanagement of government on a global scale. The problem is that central banks have no control over the economy. Add to this, this type of inflation is substantially different than a speculative boom. This inflation is based upon shortages. These morons with covid . . . with lockdowns, ended up destroying the supply chains. . . . Things that are there, I buy extra of because next time it might be gone. So, everybody is increasing their hoarding. . . . So, what we have with Europe, with its negative interest rates, they have wiped out all the pension funds. They need 8% to break even, not negative rates. There is not a pension fund in Europe that is solvent at this stage of the game. . . . The European government is collapsing. If they end up defaulting, you are going to have millions of people down there with pitch forks storming the parliament. So, to avoid that, they need war. . . . The Biden Administration has deliberately destroyed the world economy.”


If there is war in Europe, the “U.S. dollar will get stronger initially and not weaker” according to Armstrong. Armstrong also says, “This is all deliberate. There is no return to normal here. Unfortunately, this is where we are headed.”
[...]

https://usawatchdog.com/the-west-needs- ... armstrong/


Full video interview at the link.
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Re: Supply Chains

Postby Belligerent Savant » Sun Apr 24, 2022 10:38 am

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Re: Supply Chains

Postby Grizzly » Sun Apr 24, 2022 8:29 pm

Food Theory: They're STEALING Your Food!
“The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe we are doing it.”

― Joseph mengele
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Re: Supply Chains

Postby drstrangelove » Thu Apr 28, 2022 11:07 am

US egg factory roasts alive 5.3 million chickens in avian flu cull – then fires almost every worker
Labourers at the one of the world’s largest egg factories arrived at the plant in Rembrandt, Iowa, early one morning in March to discover they were about to work themselves out of a job.

As they gathered at the huge barns housing stacks of caged hens, the workers were told to forget about their usual routine of collecting eggs and feeding the birds. Overnight, the factory had begun slaughtering more than 5 million chickens using a gruesome killing method after detecting a single case of avian influenza. Even supervisors were assigned to the arduous task of dragging dead hens out of packed cages as Rembrandt Enterprises raced to contain the spread of the virus amid the largest bird flu outbreak in the US in seven years.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/202 ... fired-iowa

They are going after protein.
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Re: Supply Chains

Postby Harvey » Thu Apr 28, 2022 2:15 pm

Reminds me of when "bovine spongiform encephalopathy" in cattle herds and "salmonella" in chickens were diagnosed across the UK in quick succession (accompanied by a wave of broadly anti-farming mainstream media propaganda) used to wipe out an entire tier of very old but relatively small and sustainable farming families. An entire farming culture was demolished at a stroke. This paved the way for the huge factory farms we have today. The same hysteria. The same rapid transformation.
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Re: Supply Chains

Postby drstrangelove » Thu Apr 28, 2022 11:07 pm

Russian Gas Cutoff Symbolizes New Era of Supply Shocks and Inflation

Inflation is the result of demand growing faster than supply. Central banks can deal with the demand part. The problem is that the world they confront in coming years might be one of recurrent supply shocks.

The decades preceding the pandemic were characterized by chronically weak demand and a seemingly limitless supply of capital, labor and raw materials, resulting in persistently low inflation and interest rates.

Those conditions have since flipped. Demand is robust, especially in the U.S., where fiscal and monetary support have been especially generous. Advanced economies report shortages of labor, and Covid-19 continues to snarl supply chains, most recently in China.

Meanwhile, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has triggered widespread shortages of commodities, in particular for food and energy. On Wednesday, Russia said it halted gas deliveries to Poland and Bulgaria, pushing up European gas prices. The same day, Indonesia announced a ban on the export of crude palm oil to limit domestic cooking-oil prices.

Maybe this is a run of bad luck that will be behind us in a year or so. Or maybe it is a prelude to an era in which geopolitical tensions, protectionist policies and natural disasters repeatedly stress the world’s supply networks. Central banks, which spent the last decade fighting off deflationary headwinds, might spend the next battling inflationary headwinds.

Inflation, in the long run, is what monetary policy makers want it to be. But the ease of achieving a target rate of inflation depends on how much the surrounding environment adds to or subtracts from cost pressures. Inflation surged in the 1970s because central banks failed to curb excess demand and allowed prices and wages to feed on themselves. But their job was made harder by repeated supply shocks that pushed up costs.

The most notable shock was the Arab oil embargo in 1973. Food prices were also driven up by the rising cost of energy and fertilizer and crop failures in Australia, Canada, the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Productivity growth slowed as energy-intensive processes had to be reworked and young, inexperienced workers flooded into the labor market.

Today, the problem isn’t with the actual supply of physical commodities but interference with the physical, legal and market mechanisms that get it from one place to another, including war and sanctions, which have strangled Ukrainian and Russian exports of wheat, oil and gas.

Zoltan Pozsar, a strategist at Credit Suisse, estimates that for Russia to reroute oil that it now ships to Europe through the Baltic Sea to customers in China or India would take an additional four months and require 80 more “very large crude carriers,” 10% more than the global fleet now has. He writes: “More expensive ships. More expensive cargo. More expensive transit fees. Much longer transit routes. More risks of piracy. More to pay for insurance. More price-volatile cargo. More margin calls. More need for term bank credit.”

Mr. Pozsar draws parallels to the financial system, which similarly relies on an infrastructure of private banks to price and move money, currencies and credit. If that infrastructure fails, funds can become inaccessible, interest rates skyrocket and currencies crash. Central banks rectify this by using their own unlimited capacity to create money and buy foreign currency. Energy markets have no equivalent lender of last resort, although Mr. Pozsar ventures (implausibly, in my view) that some countries’ military forces serve that purpose by keeping sea lanes open.

When shifting demand and supply fundamentals drive up a price, markets eventually fix the problem. The World Bank noted, in a report released this week, that higher oil prices in the 1970s brought forth new supply from Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay and the North Sea. In response to high food prices, Argentina and Brazil went from producing virtually no soybeans to 17% and 50%, respectively, of the world’s output, it said. Conservation trims demand, such as through higher fuel standards and lower thermostat settings. And technology devises alternatives.

But governments today are often doing the opposite, according to the World Bank. Their “policies so far have taken the form of tax cuts and fuel subsidies, especially for gasoline…Such measures actually increase demand and put further upward pressure on the prices of crude oil and other petroleum products.”

The World Bank, in a 2019 report, noted that governments also ban exports when prices are high and encourage exports when prices are low, amplifying price swings in both directions. In 2010-11, such policies contributed to a jump in wheat and maize prices that tipped 8.3 million people into poverty, it estimates.

China is doing something similar now, according to a new report by Chad Bown and Yilin Wang of the Peterson Institute for International Economics. They say China has restricted exports of fertilizer and steel, driving up prices for consumers in other countries. It has also lowered then raised pork tariffs in response to domestic conditions, whipsawing global markets. “The trouble with China is that it continues to act like a small country,” they wrote. “Its policies can be beggar-thy-neighbor,” solving “a domestic problem by passing along its cost to people elsewhere.”

Even if these short-term disruptions soon recede, there are ample opportunities for more in coming years. As cold war sets in between Russia, China and the West, tariffs, sanctions and export controls will likely become more frequent. Climate presents another set of ongoing risks: Extreme weather can disrupt supply chains and electrical grids, while net-zero mandates can cut capacity of legacy power systems and spur bidding wars for minerals needed in renewable energy systems.

These need not keep a committed central bank from achieving low inflation. But they make the job harder, and the results a lot less pleasant for the public.

- https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-age-of ... 1651060801
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Re: Supply Chains

Postby MacCruiskeen » Tue May 10, 2022 6:00 am

Today's Neue Zürcher Zeitung reports on "the worst drought in 40 years" in the Horn of Africa. Twenty million people are affected.

Image
https://pbs.twimg.com/card_img/15238745 ... name=small

https://www.nzz.ch/international/duerre ... ld.1682588

Meanwhile, the 50° C heatwave continues in India and Pakistan.

Even in Germany, farmers are getting worried about the unseasonably hot and dry spring after an unseasonably mild and dry winter:
Image
https://twitter.com/MichaelKnoll16/stat ... 14/photo/1

"Saxony without rain again - Farmers warn of failed harvests
In large parts of eastern Germany, the soil is dried out to a depth of 1.80 m (6 ft). Farmers are hoping desperately for rain in May."


I've seen similar reports from France, and presumably things are not much different elsewhere in continental Europe.

All this after the two-year campaign of impoverishment, health-destruction and supply-chain disruption that was COUPVID Phase 1.

Ten weeks ago we transitioned smoothly into Phase 2, with the "sanctions on Russia" now hitting ordinary Europeans hard. Staples such as oatmeal, spaghetti and flour have already risen in price by around 40%, and even the most mainstream "experts" are warning of further steep inflation to come, soon and across the board. Some items are sold out completely (vegetable oils, kitchen towels, etc) and supermarkets have started putting up signs pleading with people not to indulge in panic buying.

I don't know how to conclude this post. We can all see the direction things are going.

If, on top of all this planned destruction, the global drought continues and harvests actually fail this year, then we're looking at real Famine, following the fake Plague and the entirely avoidable War our Leaders are now so zealously prolonging. That's three out of four Horsemen, so far.
"Ich kann gar nicht so viel fressen, wie ich kotzen möchte." - Max Liebermann,, Berlin, 1933

"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts." - Richard Feynman, NYC, 1966

TESTDEMIC ➝ "CASE"DEMIC
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