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What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

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Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#401

Post by [deleted] »

gruez wrote: post #205
ladyattis wrote: post #67

Earlier 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".…

[deleted]

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#402

Post by aahortwwy »

ilammy wrote: post #381
doopy1 wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't they have to payback the loans at some point? And at that point do they not liquidate some assets to do so and pay taxes on that? (Serious question.)

You don't use all your assets as a collateral – you loan out, say, 1%, for the needs you have. If the creditor demands a repayment for some reason – and if you're still solvent, it's not like your IOU can't be treated as money in itself – then you can get a loan on some other 1% of your now-appreciated assets, use that to repay the first loan. All without liquidating any assets and accruing any “income”. Then pass th…

You can presumably go a layer deeper and use the loaned cash to build an investment portfolio with a rate of return sufficient to fund your lifestyle, pay the interest on the original loan, and pay for the management of the whole thing.

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#403

Post by xbar »

No.

The bottleneck was the 3 hour boat tour. Imagine how much time we could have saved if we had just cut to the chase?

Also, he took a real Gilligan's Island risk just going out on a 3 hour boat tour. We could still be stuck and he could be stranded on a desert isle somewhere in the South Pacific.

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#404

Post by wombatpm »

nickff wrote: post #356
ethbr0 wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> GM and the rest of Detroit got their rear ends handed to them by the Japanese and their application of JIT GM and the rest of Detroit got their rear ends handed to them because they'd underinvested in fuel-efficient engine designs (the lost 70s) and grown lazy in reliability. Lean manufacturing may have allowed Japanese manufacturers to price more competitively and be more agile, but at the end of the day, they inc…

> "GM and the rest of Detroit got their rear ends handed to them because they'd underinvested in fuel-efficient engine designs (the lost 70s) and grown lazy in reliability." You're leaving out some pressures which caused Detroit to be un-competitive in the small car space, including high labor costs.

I owned a 79 Ford Mustang in 1986. By 1988 and 88k miles the engine was shot because it was an underpowered 2liter 4 cylinder with a turbo. Detroit was uncompetitive because they made sucky cars. To this day I haven’t owned another Ford and never will.

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#405

Post by whatever1 »

roiboosxh wrote: post #380
whatever1 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the two is true: 1) The market value of a company is true, aka the owners of this company must be taxed for the real value growth in their portfolio (since it constitutes income), even if they do not sell 2) It’s a casino, a share is just a ticket that may worth nothing or a billion. In that case we don’t need tax protections. The owners of the tickets must be taxed only when they cash out. The governments sho…

You cannot tax an asset that does not move. In what intervals would you do this? Your bank account would go to zero.

If the underlying asset is real (not speculative) and it grows, then it is income. So it should be taxed whether you spend it or not.

But nobody wants this because we all know it’s pure speculation. That is why we call it “unrealized gains”.

If everyone tomorrow tries to cash out their Apple stock, except from the first few, all the rest will get 1 cent each. There is no value in these tickets, just the power of combined speculation.

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#406

Post by karaterobot »

xmprt wrote: post #250
gruez wrote: post #205

Earlier 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?

It should not be a shock that a company that provides a wide variety of goods delivered for relatively little money would do well during a global quarantine.

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#407

Post by notacoward »

robomartin wrote: post #395
11thEarlOfMar wrote: post #387

On the other hand, sometimes, it's straight ahead bad luck. A chip we use in one of our products is made in a semiconductor fab in Malaysia. It's the only place in the world that makes the chip. That fab has been shut down for about 6 months as the nation struggles with COVID. In the meantime, the inventory in the supply chain, and even customer warehouses, has been picked clean by brokers to be re-sold for high-cost…

If you post the part number someone might be able to help you.

More likely, another HNer who knows of a supply will use that information to "hustle" their way into a bigger profit. I'd strongly advise against sharing the part number.

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#408

Post by andrekandre »

legutierr wrote: post #224
mfer wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't know if a slight price increase in graphics cards is the key issue to worry about at this point. The price increase in graphics cards isn't related to this. GMs trouble selling cars because they don't have enough chips to finish off the cars is a problem related to the pandemic and planning like the posts on Twitter note. The lack of new cars available has driven up prices on used cars. This is all supply c…

> In the last 130 years there have been two world wars and two global pandemics. One rationale behind the push for global integration after WW2 and later on with China and the former Soviet Bloc was the idea that such integration would create incentives against a resurgence of war between great powers. It is precisely because another world war would be so disruptive in light of global economic integration that global…

  > One rationale behind the push for global integration after WW2 and later on with China and the former Soviet Bloc was the idea that such integration would create incentives against a resurgence of war between great powers.
i wonder what the recent resurgence of nationalism and "us vs them" thinking plays into this...

is it possible that our global economic system, international relations etc are not yet evolved enough to keep such a system functioning stably (in geo-political terms)?

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#409

Post by notacoward »

legitster wrote: post #180
modeless wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the grand scheme of things, having a couple weeks of extra inventory on hand will not help you weather a 100 year storm. That's not really what he's saying. It's not about a single company, it's about the whole economy. When every company is running JIT, a small temporary supply disruption anywhere can bubble and propagate through the whole chain, becoming a huge disaster. It's like a traffic jam; when a highway…

Supply chain issues were sooo much worse before JIT. Imagine one person taps the brakes, but every car weighs 100 tons. When companies kept huge inventories, most of it was not useful to solve the supply chain issues that came up and often made it harder to respond to demand shocks.

[citation needed]

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#410

Post by stainforth »

joe_the_user wrote: post #63

I believe the claim is completely defensible and ultimately correct. A) This was a multi-factoral event certainly but all of these other factor are "immediate causes" which can themselves be traced to absolute maximum return on equity as a more final cause. B) No doubt "hard to restart" process are were involved. But the world relies on single-source, hard to restart, large scale production of many things today becau…

B) Buyers are not willing actors
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