I’m not sure if I’m preaching to the choir or just beating a dead horse, but I continue to be concerned about supply chain issues. I’ve mentioned my concerns and experiences more than once in these ongoing #quarantinediaries posts. It’s a small sample size, but based on comments I’ve gotten, it would appear that Europeans and Canadians haven’t been experiencing supply chain problems to the extent that Americans have, except when news of the pandemic first broke. I don’t have an understanding of why America seems to be having more problems, particularly versus Canada since our two economies are so intertwined.
I’m starting to wonder if one day I’ll be telling grandchildren about the olden days when you could go to a store and buy whatever you wanted. I find myself frequently having to go to more than one store to get what I want, and often coming up short. An anecdotal bit of evidence: I used to do most of my grocery shopping at Cub, a chain of grocery stores serving Minnesota and Illinois (Wisconsin too?), with occasional forays to Aldi or Target. Lately I’ve had to branch out because of not being able to find some items, and have done some shopping at Walmart, a chain that I’ve tended to avoid.
But it too has a lot of empty shelves. Just today, this is what shelves looked like in the produce area that would typically have several kinds of potatoes, yams, squash, shallots, and onions (granted, there’s a salmonella outbreak affecting some varieties of onions):
This kind of stuff has been going on for five months now so can no longer be written off as panic buying or hoarding. As we move into what might be a deepening economic hole this fall and winter, might supply chain problems get even worse than we’ve already seen?
Coronavirus News and Analysis:
“They are dying. That’s true. It is what it is.” Trump’s Axios interview was a disaster.
Despite ample warning, the U.S. squandered every possible opportunity to control the coronavirus. And despite its considerable advantages—immense resources, biomedical might, scientific expertise—it floundered. While countries as different as South Korea, Thailand, Iceland, Slovakia, and Australia acted decisively to bend the curve of infections downward, the U.S. achieved merely a plateau in the spring, which changed to an appalling upward slope in the summer. “The U.S. fundamentally failed in ways that were worse than I ever could have imagined,” Julia Marcus, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School, told me.
Rep. Louie Gohmert’s (R-TX) daughter:
Dollar’s Slide Is a Warning That U.S. Has Lost Grip on Virus
After hitting an all-time high in March, a gauge of the greenback has lost 10% of its value, with declines accelerating in recent weeks as infections spread seemingly unchecked across the nation. Much of the sell-off has come during New York trading hours, suggesting domestic investors are closing out bets on U.S. strength and spurring renewed questions about the supremacy of the dollar.
Almost half of all jobs lost during pandemic may be gone permanently
Iran cover-up of deaths revealed by data leak
Is this the future of helicopter money? Two Ex-Fed Officials Have a Faster Way to Distribute Money in a Recession.
