The Dollar INFLATION? Part 2.
(see link to Part 1 attached below)
Hello,Traders!
As we found out in Part 1,the FED and The Treasury added 5.3 Trillion dollars to the money supply, with 3 Trillion Dollars being spent, not invested and all that coming from borrowing, not taxes, which would have created price inflation even without the supply shock.
However, the supply side was also affected by the lockdowns, and below is a summary of how this happened!
First of all, we saw a massive structural change, with the demand suddenly shifting from services to goods, as the majority of the former became unavailable to the indoors bound population.
That additional demand for goods, would have strained the supply chain in any scenario, but several factors made it much much worse.
First, the lockdowns in China, especially Wohan, a major logistics hub, brought some of the manufacturing and shipping to a halt, that led to the initial shortages, but the demand fell sharply too, so at first, the two canceled each other out. Then with China opening up at the end of 2020 faster than any other country, and the demand picking up in the US and other countries , China started shipping Covid-19 supplies and other goods to the rest of the world.
But as manufacturing in China recovered, the United States were locked down, which affected two major ports in the US: the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. The thing is that 41% of all the US container traffic goes through just these two, and while the container traffic went up by 49%, the ports were operating at lower capacity, due to the dock workers either being sick with Covid, or being in quarantine.
Loaded Ships were stranded for weeks, waiting to be unloaded, doubling the shipping time. As if that wasn’t enough, the shipping containers price went from 1800$ to 3500$, because due to the lockdowns in the US there wasn’t much to be shipped back to China, and for every 100 containers that went in, only 40 were exported back. The ports operating at lower capacity didn’t have the resources to load empty containers onto the ships going back to China, and the truck drivers shortage lead to that the empty containers weren’t returned back to the ports, from inside the US.
This led to a vicious cycle: shortage of shipping containers was worsening the shortage of shipping capacity, which was worsened by the shortage of port capacity, which in turn was worsening the shortage of shipping containers, which as in turn worsened by the shortage of truck drivers which worsened the shortage of goods.
All that led to scarcity exacerbated by the debt funded, non-investment consumer spending, and worsened by a demand shifting from services to goods.A perfect storm situation, which nearly collapsed the «Just-in-Time» manufacturing based supply chains.
All that led to the official FED inflation figures for April 2021 being 4.2%, which is A LOT! And more is to come, if the lockdowns are not lifted, and, especially,if Biden's 6 Trillion budget gets passed.
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