Bill Ackman on the damage done by Trump's trade war

Unless it is clear that a company can continue to source from China on economically viable terms, it must leave the country.  There is not a board of directors or management team who will ever again feel comfortable relying on China for a major portion of their supply chain.  The damage has been done.

~ Bill Ackman

Marko Papic on price inflation and supply problems

Why do we have inflation?  "Oh, it's Biden's stimulus."  Well, no.  False.  False.  First of all, it's Biden-Trump's stimulus.  Second of all, forget stimulus.  Forget that, that's easy.  You raise rates, done.  Demand gone.  The problem is, we have this plethora of idiosyncratic supply problems that seem idiosyncratic; they seem separate from each other.  But actually there are a cacophony of evidence that's telling you that we have completely dismantled the well-functioning, well-oiled machine.  Supply chain, just-in-time, all this stuff.  And why did we do it?  We decided that global warming was going to kill us tomorrow.  Not in 10 or 100 years.  No, no, tomorrow.  So we need to deal with it right now.  And the problem with that is what we've done is we've starved fossil fuel industry of capital.  We've turned off the capex tap at the same time that we didn't turn off the demand tap.  Like we're not all driving Teslas.  Sorry.  Some of us drive F150s.  So the problem with that is that we have an energy crisis, which is of our own making.  We have a supply chain crisis because five years ago we all thought China was cool; now we all think China is going to kill us.  So now we have to also fight a war with China tomorrow, we have to solve climate change tomorrow, and then finally, of course, Covid... disruptions also created supply chain problems.

~ Marko Papic, interview with Dan Ferris, Stansberry Investor Hour, 37:50 mark, October 31, 2022

Gloomy headlines on supply chain problems

“No End In Sight For The COVID-Led Global Supply Chain Disruption” ~ Forbes, September 3, 2021 

“Global Supply Problems Worsen” ~ The Wall Street Journal, October 9, 2021 

“Snarled shipping lanes could mean empty shelves come holiday shopping time” ~ New York Post, October 12, 2021

“How the Global Supply Chain Failed” ~ The New York Times, October 23, 2021

October 9, 2021

John Tamny on the root cause of supply chain shortages

Look back to Adam Smith.  I think it's fairly basic here: his opening pages are about a pin factory.  A man alone in a pin factory could maybe produce one pin per day, but a man working with several coworkers where everyone was specializing in that same pin factory could produce tens of thousands.  

So you think about something unsophisticated like that and then consider airplanes and computers and toys.  Imagine the global cooperation of billions of workers entering into trillions of different contractual arrangements over the decades on the way to this global supply and then a political class that thought it needed to guide us away from a virus decided to shut down the most sophisticated the world had ever known.  Is anyone surprised that we've got shortages right now?  

The shortages are a statement of the obvious, but what's offensive is when we call it supply chain shortages or inflation.  No, this was central planning.  This was the imposition of command and control where there had been freedom before.  Let's be very clear about what happened: the political class - Republicans and Democrats and everyone in between - caused this when they went for lockdowns as a virus mitigation strategy.

~ John Tamny, "Key Takeaways from the Annual Stansberry Conference," 43:40 mark, November 4, 2021