‘A perfect storm’: supply chain crisis could blow world economy off course | Hacker News Reader

‘A perfect storm’: supply chain crisis could blow world economy off course

theguardian.com

Maybe, just maybe we should take a long hard look at just how fragile and easy to topple all of our supply chains are, and actually do something to build in more resilience, to better weather adverse conditions.

With how the climate is changing, we are only going to see more and more instability and disturbances to production and shipping in the future, due to climate refugees and unrest.

We've played a dangerous game of brinkmanship and now we're paying the price.

> how fragile and easy to topple all of our supply chains are

I'd say that our supply chains are pretty resilient if toppling them takes every government in the world shutting down their economies and locking everyone in their houses for months, all at the same time.

That is not what happened though. Oil kept flowing, remember the tankers with no where to port? Container ships kept chugging. Cargo planes and repurposed commercial crafts kept transporting. Factories kept cranking out widgets. Rampant consumerism definitely took a a pause which hurt the industries we all rely on to survive.

Industries need to reevaluate their resilience to disruption and plan for the unthinkable. The feeling of schadenfreude, as I recall the countless canaries enumerating the consequences of fragile supply chains that no one even vaguely understands, is sad and predictable.

People forget the lockdown was for the rich, the poor still had to go work in essential positions at low pay and high risk to keep the spice flowing.

I doubt “forget” as much as a difficult truth no one wants to think about.

I have the opposite feeling. The service sector was forced into shutdown and stay home orders were deliberately applied globally. Meanwhile the uber wealthy could just hop on their private jets and fly to either a country with less restrictions, or their private islands.

It was a good stress test. I think it will take natural disasters with permanent damage to the electric grid and internet infrastructure for it to be crippling.

> Maybe, just maybe we should take a long hard look at just how fragile and easy to topple all of our supply chains are, and actually do something to build in more resilience, to better weather adverse conditions.

hindsight is 20/20. just in time delivery help keeps food waste low, but before covid there were tons of articles lamenting how much food waste there was in america and how we needed to reduce it. I suspect a similar sentiment would exist for hundreds of square miles of valuable land put to non-productive use (warehouses) because we wanted to keep a bunch of inputs on hand just in case.

> Maybe, just maybe we should take a long hard look at just how fragile and easy to topple all of our supply chains are

A global pandemic hasn't taken out the supply chain. So I wouldn't say fragile.

> With how the climate is changing, we are only going to see more and more instability and disturbances to production and shipping in the future, due to climate refugees and unrest.

Global warming is going to open up the northwest passage and the arctic trade routes which would cut shipping times by a huge percentage from asia to europe. It would be the greatest boon to world trade in human history.

> We've played a dangerous game of brinkmanship and now we're paying the price.

Seems like we are always on the brink of something. It's neverending and it's always wrong.

> Global warming is going to open up the northwest passage and the arctic trade routes which would cut shipping times by a huge percentage from asia to europe. It would be the greatest boon to world trade in human history.

Climate change is going to cause droughts and starvation for millions and millions of people, who are either going to die or desperately seek to migrate to the parts of the world that are less inhospitable.

An increase in potential global trade is a drop in the ocean against the instability that large scale climate migrations are going to cause, especially considering how hostile our governments and media have acted against immigrants for decades.

I don't know what the perfect storm is, everything looks great to me. Yes, the car manufactures are cutting their productions, some people will wait for their new cars, who cares. the supermarket is full of stuffs, more than enough for everyone, each of us can choose a different brand and there are still enough for us. What's the problem?

We're not seeing empty shelves in supermarkets just yet, groceries are still available, because most places have reasonably local production available.

But electronics, cars, machinery, the kinds of things that are produced more centrally in just one part of the world are facing shortages. It's a small thing, but there was a 3 week wait on the access point I bought recently, where in normal times that would have been a day-to-day delivery. The mechanical keyboard I was looking to buy took a full year to get back in stock before I could order it.

These are of course small things, luxuries in the grand scope of life. But industries are facing component shortages that are going to last for years.

Even then, supermarkets being stocked isn't a self-sustaining vacuum. Not all goods sold are produced within 100 miles. The fields are cleared with industrial equipment, sourced with semiconductors and parts produced across continents, the grain is processed in a facility, the product is delivered by a driver, and some point later a 99¢ box of pasta is on the shelf. Very few items can carry on forever due to complete sourcing, production and distribution occurring as closed systems. We simply don't have that level of vertical integration.

Equipment keeps on running until it needs to be repaired or replaced. If you can't get parts or new machinery at that point, you're screwed for a while, currently that can be a long while. Those situations will add up and get worse and worse.

This is going to sound crazy but I remember articles like this but about an inevitable pandemic just prior to a bunch of governments suddenly declaring a pandemic and drastically flipping society upside down in harsh ways that were not at all symptoms of an actual virus.

I’m not optimistic that a supply chain crisis which “blows the global economy off course” wouldn’t be caused by some terrible attempts by governments to “get ahead of” the impacts of a supply chain crisis.

That doesn't sound crazy.

Anyone paying attention realizes many of the well-intentioned responses to the pandemic had unintended consequences.

This is nothing new. During the great depression livestock prices dropped so the government culled entire herds to drive prices up again. Then people went hungry.

Smoot-Hawley tariff had similar negative impacts.

In Communist China the government declared war on sparrows because they ate the grain, so they destroyed the population, which caused pest insects to proliferate and destroyed the crops. Then people starved.

There's a long history of government intervention which cause massive disruptions that take many years to stabilize.

>Anyone paying attention realizes many of the well-intentioned responses to the pandemic had unintended consequences.

For me Occam's razor suggests that the consequences are mostly intended. The decision makers in politics, media, and fortune 500 companies aren't stupid and are doing quite well for themselves.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com