Fickling: All the ships plying the seas are all powered by fuel oil, but that’s surprisingly not the biggest factor in the cost of shipping. The place where it’s really important is in China itself. In terms of every major commodity — aluminum, copper, steel, all of those industrial qualities that are the very basis of these supply chains — China makes pretty much 50% of all of them. They’re very energy-intensive. In fact, they’re so energy-intensive that the Chinese government has been having some pretty serious efforts to actually crack down on these industries. They want to reduce output and particularly reduce emissions because of their own goals.Read more:Making Acquisitions to Control the Supply Chain: Brooke SutherlandBrace for Years of Chaos in Container Shipping: David FicklingCan 1% of Singapore’s Land Feed Its Population?: Daniel MossGLOBAL INSIGHT: U.S. Supply Crunch Is Easing, Europe’s Is Not: Bjorn van Roye and Tom OrlikBillions of Dollars Won’t Fix All the Shortages: Anjani TrivediSutherland: Even as the U.S. has reopened and been more ahead of the curve versus some of the other parts of the world, you can get on an airplane today. You can go to a movie theater, and people are spending on those things. Bank of America publishes really interesting credit card data, and they showed that airline spending turned positive on a two-year basis for the first time this year in the past couple of weeks. Entertainment spending is up about 4% relative to pre-pandemic levels, and yet we still see insane spending on goods. Furniture spending is still up almost 35% on a two-year basis, home improvement store spending is up almost 50%. It’s interesting that even as we’ve seen this reopening trend, the U.S. consumer is still very willing to spend on goods, and that’s contributing to some of the supply chain challenges that we’ve seen.
Everything You Need to Know About the Global Supply Chain Crisis
