Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sweden
What about Sweden? https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
Compare it to UK: https://ourworldindata.org/covid-deaths
What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?
251–260 of 690 posts
Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Yep, the capital owning class just doesn't care if their businesses go into shock because they already have their cash in hand. You do realize when we talk about jeff bezos being a billionaire, it doesn't mean he has his billions in gold/cash in a vault somewhere? The overwhelming majority of his wealth is tied in various financial assets (eg. equities) that certainly do get affected when "businesses go into shock".…
That brings me to wonder...who has the most cash on hand at any given time and how much cash do they have? I'm really quite curious about that.
I have $9.00 and three Avenue C coupons in my wallet.
Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep, the capital owning class just doesn't care if their businesses go into shock because they already have their cash in hand. They'll never go back to pre-ROE days because they'd have to live with less money and worse less control. While they still have personal reserves in the billions they can decide the fate of their ventures but if say 20% of their current cash was on the balance sheets of corporations with boa…
> Yep, the capital owning class just doesn't care if their businesses go into shock because they already have their cash in hand. Billionaires have relatively very little cash in hand. Their billions typically are in form of business equity, and so they very much care of the businesses go into shock.
Relatively little can apparently be $10B:
“ In 2014, for example, Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison disclosed he had used 250 million of his Oracle shares as collateral to secure a $9.7 billion personal line of credit.”
Source: https://www.businessinsider.com/american-billionaires-tax-av...
Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be even more fair, there's absolutely no reason to think these types of events are independent; there's good reason to believe they're positively correlated. This means once one happens the chances of it happening again soon are greater than before it happened. (But if you're lucky and it doesn't happen again the chances decrease further, giving you an average of 100 years between them again.)
I can believe a pandemic might cause a global economic catastrophe on par with the Great Depression or the Great Recession, but I my imagination isn’t giving me any ideas how the latter might cause the former?
By the economic catastrophe causing us to elect a president who dismantled a group that worked to monitor and respond to global health issues to prevent them from becoming a pandemic. I think it's hard to say if that group could have prevented Covid-19. Nor am I necessarily saying that the economic crises of 2008 caused us to elect Trump. But I think you could possibly find a path from one one to the other.
Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep, the capital owning class just doesn't care if their businesses go into shock because they already have their cash in hand. They'll never go back to pre-ROE days because they'd have to live with less money and worse less control. While they still have personal reserves in the billions they can decide the fate of their ventures but if say 20% of their current cash was on the balance sheets of corporations with boa…
>Yep, the capital owning class just doesn't care if their businesses go into shock because they already have their cash in hand. You do realize when we talk about jeff bezos being a billionaire, it doesn't mean he has his billions in gold/cash in a vault somewhere? The overwhelming majority of his wealth is tied in various financial assets (eg. equities) that certainly do get affected when "businesses go into shock".…
>it's still in his best interest to ensure that the economy doesn't crash
Technically, yeah! Functionally, though, if the Even Greater Depression arrived tomorrow? He'd still be the richest man alive, and probably even more powerful than he already is right now thanks to how Amazon and AWS would get to take over more failing social institutions.
Sure, a falling tide lowers all boats, but Bezos will still comfortably afford his gigayacht. It's a setback for Bezos, and maybe he wants to avoid it in order to maximize profit and utility and whatever, but it's an existential threat to him in the same way spilling a glass of milk or losing a round in a video game are. Even extreme social unrest has been priced in, at however much a luxury bunker in New Zealand costs.
Other people, when the Big Crash arrives, will -- in a totally economically rational way! -- commit suicide in order to ensure their spouses and children aren't bankrupted by their medical bills. Uh, in greater numbers than they already do. Many will starve, or at least go very hungry. In greater numbers, I mean. Should be a good time for the owner class to buy up all the housing stock for cheap, too.
I don't think the owner class is worried about it. I think they actually might be excited.
Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?
#256This is like a Rorschach test. There is truly something for everyone.
What caused all the supply chains bottlenecks?
Hard Left: "It's the fault of *capitalism*!"
Hard Right: "It's the fault of *unions*!"
Soft Left: "Truckers don't have a living wage!"
Soft Right: "We stopped producing because of lockdowns!"
Greens: "It's *climate change* disrupting the economy!"
Libertarians: "*Government mismanagement of ports!*"
YIMBYs: "*Zoning laws don't allow stacking!*"
De-regulators: "*AB 5 bans independent operator trucks!*"
Taleb: "Globalization JIT is *too fragile*!"
Krugman: "Republicans destroyed our infrastructure!"
Montana: "Workers are staying home, collecting unemployment!" (h/t tamaharbor)
Full Disclosure: I have no idea what the causes of the port bottlenecks are, but it's a great launching pad for talking about all of these issues.
Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?
#257I can speak from a trucking perspective. it was a cascade failure for professional drivers. when covid first hit, supply chains either had too much or too little almost instantly. Things like raw supplies based on JIT ordering either ground to a halt because demand died and so did the modelling, or because demand was too high for the computer model (think a bell curve.) low-boy trucks shipping things like constructio…
When the climate crisis begins to hit, this kind of a system will rapidly collapse the world economy way before climate change even starts to wipe humans out.
Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Yep, the capital owning class just doesn't care if their businesses go into shock because they already have their cash in hand. You do realize when we talk about jeff bezos being a billionaire, it doesn't mean he has his billions in gold/cash in a vault somewhere? The overwhelming majority of his wealth is tied in various financial assets (eg. equities) that certainly do get affected when "businesses go into shock".…
Genuine question: 2020 feels like the biggest shock to the economy in a while yet it was one of the best years for most big businesses. If Jeff Bezos didn't feel the shock from 2020 then when will he feel the shock?
>2020 feels like the biggest shock to the economy in a while yet it was one of the best years for most big businesses.
by what metric?
Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?
#259For an alternate take, see https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/10/the-real-culprit-in-o... ...
These posts raise some interesting points I hadn't thought about (I don't see any problem with Next-in accounting). But it seems that lack of inventory isn't the only problem, throughput at ports is also an issue, and the ports themselves are limited at what changes they can make to fix these issues, partly due to profits (no one will want to operate a huge port that's profitable 5% of the time), but also partly due to limits put on ports and shipping by the government.
Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?
#260He's right to point out that the obsession with RoE is a big part of the problem. He's wrong to suggest that the billionaire class and founders will solve the problem if we only trust them and let them keep their money. Founders have just as much incentive to optimize the excess out of the system, they just call it "disruptive innovation" by which they mean tweaking how the system works so that they can squeeze out p…
> I think economists call it rent-seeking. There was a book published a couple of years ago (before the pandemic) which was "demonstrating" (so to speak) that going back through history real financial/economic levelling at a reasonable scale only happened as a result of violent means (wars, revolutions etc). I think what those violent means do (among other, more nasty things like people getting killed) is that (in so…
Probably "The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century"