Global Spring?

[Immaculate Vibes 114]

Instead of posting these videos in the 6thSJ inflation thread, I might as well start a thread here. Rising wheat prices led to unrest in 2010 and started the Arab Spring. This time there’s multiple commodities with prices going parabolic all over the globe. It’s just getting started, but unfortunately I think the outcome will be unrest on every continent. Hope I’m wrong. No CR discussion just tracking these events.  
 

Peru

 

 

The curfew was disregarded and subsequently rescinded. 
 

Greece

 

Translation for those that don’t tweet

“24-hour general strike and demonstrations in Greece against soaring prices and low wages. Public services and maritime, rail and urban transport are paralyzed in the country. Inflation reached 7.2% in Greece, a record level for 25 years.”

 

[crash_davis 23094]

2020 was the start of this shit. everyone thought it couldn't get worse. and here we are...

[Aqua Buddha 14581]

Kinda cloaky but some people will tell you that Fed monetary policy causes this and that's not the case.  We have a shortage of everything and changing interest rates of government spending won't change that.

[crash_davis 23094]

for shits and giggles, i googled "signs of the apocalypse". looks like we're almost there.

 

Antichrist - check, each group is sure he's here (just name and face are different)

war - check

famine - thanks to this thread, it's coming

plague - check

judgment - TBD

chaos - check

silence or rebirth - TBD

[Immaculate Vibes 114]

2 minutes ago, Aqua Buddha said:

Kinda cloaky but some people will tell you that Fed monetary policy causes this and that's not the case.  We have a shortage of everything and changing interest rates of government spending won't change that.

Mildly cloaky but that’s ok. Monetary expansion and supply chain disruption primed the pump. Geopolitical forces accelerating things now. 
 

But you’re right now that central banks can’t print oil or food stuffs. We’re in a bad spot globally. 

[ATexanAbroad 627]

eh, south americans protest every day over something, its super normal. Its like a past time down here. 

[Macanudo 12974]

Sell your orange juice futures now!   Sell!  SELL!!!  SELL!!!!!!!!!!!

[crash_davis 23094]

1 minute ago, ATexanAbroad said:

eh, south americans protest every day over something, its super normal. Its like a past time down here. 

username checks out

[Blotto 23484]

yeah there's a lot of shit brewing globally that makes me think 22 will be worse than 20 and 21. China fucking with Taiwan right now would send things off the fucking cliff. You think supply chain issues are bad now, wait until 60%+ of the global semiconductor market is in flux. I'm not predicting China would do that by any means, but rationale action seems to be going out of favor these days. 

[Parliament 14225]

I work in agriculture, and we've been following this real close.  Russia is a major producer of nitrogen and phosphate fertlizer.  Ukraine is a huge exporter (#1?) of wheat and raises like HALF of the world's sunflowers.

[Bevo 13558]

What's up with the Japanese Giant Hornets and the locust swarms?

[Surly Bevo 24908]

2 hours ago, Aqua Buddha said:

We have a shortage of everything and changing interest rates of government spending won't change that.

It's almost like we need a good plague....

[Bevo 13558]

1 minute ago, Surly Bevo said:

It's almost like we need a good plague....

wait for it. wait for it.

[fattyflattie 4639]

2 hours ago, crash_davis said:

for shits and giggles, i googled "signs of the apocalypse". looks like we're almost there.

 

Antichrist - check, each group is sure he's here (just name and face are different)

war - check

famine - thanks to this thread, it's coming

plague - check

judgment - TBD

chaos - check

silence or rebirth - TBD

I got sent a rather inappropriate tweet the other day that didn’t age well (at all) over the last 10 years or whatever it was, along these lines. Was worth a chuckle even though it didn’t fit my political take, but it checked like 5 of the 6 boxes.   
 

Who should I marry daddy, who should I marry?

Find yourself a man in oil and cattle. At the very least they’ll be beef steaks to eat, and a couple of buckets of crude oil to heat your castle. 

[Trey3216 15343]

The Spring of our Discontent.  

[Walser 1109]

5 hours ago, fattyflattie said:

I got sent a rather inappropriate tweet the other day that didn’t age well (at all) over the last 10 years or whatever it was, along these lines. Was worth a chuckle even though it didn’t fit my political take, but it checked like 5 of the 6 boxes.   
 

Who should I marry daddy, who should I marry?

Find yourself a man in oil and cattle. At the very least they’ll be beef steaks to eat, and a couple of buckets of crude oil to heat your castle. 

They will be beef steaks to eat?

[ztejas 43411]

8 hours ago, Macanudo said:

Sell your orange juice futures now!   Sell!  SELL!!!  SELL!!!!!!!!!!!

 

[fattyflattie 4639]

41 minutes ago, Walser said:

They will be beef steaks to eat?

*thale

[Loop 1604 227]

Quote

No CR discussion 

 

[SimonBolivar 10957]

6 hours ago, Trey3216 said:

The Spring of our Discontent.  

Was ever woman in this humor wooed? Was ever woman in this humour won?

[atomheartbevo 89618]

10 hours ago, Immaculate Vibes said:

Rising wheat prices led to unrest in 2010 and started the Arab Spring. This time there’s multiple commodities with prices going parabolic all over the globe. It’s just getting started, but unfortunately I think the outcome will be unrest on every continent. Hope I’m wrong. No CR discussion just tracking these events.  

7 hours ago, Parliament said:

I work in agriculture, and we've been following this real close.  Russia is a major producer of nitrogen and phosphate fertlizer.  Ukraine is a huge exporter (#1?) of wheat and raises like HALF of the world's sunflowers.

I posted an interview with Peter Zeihan in the Ukraine thread where he talks about agriculture and fertilizer, and in another interview, he said that the thing that keeps him up at night is the fertilizer issue.

Everybody is laser-focused on Ukraine producing so much grain, etc. and how the Russians trying to destroy grain supplies or shut down Ukrainian exports, but he mentioned that people are oblivious to the fertilizer issue - Russia being a major producer of fertilizers and China's potash fertilizer issues.  As he said in an interview, fertilizer is not "sexy" and people just don't realize its importance.

On the one hand, pretty doom-and-gloom - he thinks that if the war keeps up and China and other countries start or continue to have fertilizer issues, you could see a shit-ton of people in the world starving in short amount of time (just a few years) going into the hundreds of millions or more, because their agriculture relies so heavily on cheap and available fertilizer.  But on the other hand, he nailed the year on when Russia would fully invade Ukraine, and he's been doing a solid job of tracking Russia's (and China's) depopulation issue and I can't find too much fault with what he's saying on fertilizer/agriculture.

[atomheartbevo 89618]

10 hours ago, Immaculate Vibes said:

but unfortunately I think the outcome will be unrest on every continent.

North America is better equipped to weather the storm than Europe/Asia/Africa.

While a lot of Asian countries could probably get by, China is fucked.  They import a lot of food.  Way too much food.  Their olds better start dying off faster (I guess they will if things go south).

[Immaculate Vibes 114]

7 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

North America is better equipped to weather the storm than Europe/Asia/Africa.

While a lot of Asian countries could probably get by, China is fucked.  They import a lot of food.  Way too much food.  Their olds better start dying off faster (I guess they will if things go south).

They’ve been planning ahead. 
 

 

[WBT 20559]

It's bleak for sure.  National Geographic had a good article.

Spoiler

War in Ukraine could plunge world into food shortages

With far less Ukrainian and Russian grain and fertilizer entering global markets, experts fear that a bleak period of scarcer, pricier food will arrive this year.

BYJOEL K. BOURNE, JR.

PUBLISHED MARCH 25, 2022

• 15 MIN READ

Jonathan Clibborn should be applying nitrogen on his winter wheat fields right now. He should be taking delivery of seed corn and sunflower, getting his planters ready to roll by the first of April. He should be enjoying spring on his farm near Lviv in western Ukraine with his Ukrainian wife, their three boys, and their dog.

Instead, Clibborn, an Irish immigrant, is doing what nearly every other Ukrainian farmer is these days: He’s checking on relatives in the war zone, sheltering families fleeing the bombs, and struggling just to keep his farm afloat. If they don’t succeed, experts warn, not only will many Ukrainians go hungry, but so will hundreds of millions around the world, perhaps triggering the greatest food crisis since World War II.

Ukraine and Russia together produce nearly 30 percent of the world’s traded wheat and 12 percent of its calories. Without them, soaring food prices and shortages could touch off a wave of instability the world hasn’t seen since the Arab Spring of 2012. The war has all but shut down grain exports from both countries. And since the two nations (along with Russia’s sanctioned ally Belarus) also supply vast amounts of fertilizer, Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine could affect every farmer on earth this year, and into the foreseeable future.

Wheat grows in a field near Uzhhorod, Zakarpattia Region, western Ukraine.

PHOTOGRAPH BY SERHII HUDAK, UKRINFORM, FUTURE PUBLISHING VIA GETTY IMAGES

Still, Clibborn considers himself lucky. He moved to Ukraine 15 years ago with just the shirt on his back, and now farms 3,000 hectares (7,500 acres) in the relatively unscathed region west of Lviv, near the Polish border.  

“Some people can’t fertilize their crop because the Russians are shooting everything that moves,” a weary Clibborn says in an Irish lilt. “There are reports of them mining the fields, the roads to the fields, not to mention a lot of unexploded ordinance and bodies in the fields. I think [wheat] yields will be on the floor—maybe a third or a quarter of what they’d normally be.”

With the conflict dragging on and the start of planting season just a week away, the agricultural time bomb is ticking ever louder. Some 26 countries around the world get more than half of their wheat from Russia and Ukraine, says Arif Husain, chief economist at the UN World Food Programme.

Critical food supply

Nearly all of Ukraine’s land is arable

and provides food for export around

the world.

Cropland

Non-cropland

BELARUS

RUSSIA

Kyiv

Lviv

Kharkiv

UKRAINE

Mariupol

Odesa

ROMANIA

Crimea

200 mi

Black Sea

200 km

Global food commodities at risk

Many nations depend on Ukraine and Russia for food. From 2016 to 2021, the two countries combined supplied 19 percent of the world's barley, 14 percent of its wheat, and more than half its sunflower seed products.

Ukraine

Russia

Sunflower seed

Barley

50% of

global

production

19%

Wheat

14

Rapeseed

6

Corn

4

Soybean

2

Christine Fellenz, NG Staff.

Sources: FAO; USGS

“If this war doesn’t get sorted out in the next couple of weeks, things will get even worse,” Husain says. “That means Ukraine will not be able to plant corn. The winter wheat in the ground will not be fertilized, and the harvest sharply reduced. That’s a real danger. They are a country of 40 million people, but they produce food for 400 million. That’s the reality of a globalized world. We are all in this together.”

A locked-up breadbasket 

Over the past decade, Ukraine, long known as the breadbasket of Europe, has become an agricultural powerhouse for much of the developing world. Better seeds, new equipment, and better agronomy—combined with massive investment, by companies like Cargill, Bunge, and Glencore, in grain-handling infrastructure and oilseed crush plants in Black Sea ports—have more than doubled Ukraine’s exports since 2012. It’s now among the top five exporters of several important grains and oilseeds, ranging from 10 percent of the world’s wheat exports to nearly half of the sunflower oil.

As the war progresses, Russia is blockading the ports and destroying port cities; a Russian missile hit a Cargill-chartered ship in the first week of the invasion. Russian exports are hindered by banking restrictions and astronomical wartime insurance premiums on grain ships. As a result, wheat, corn, and soy prices already are soaring past those of the last global food price crises of 2012 and 2008, with wheat jumping 60 percent since the beginning of February.

Spanish shepherd Cristobal Jesus Calle Lopez, 39, feeds wheat to his sheep in Montejaque on March 11. Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine and the resulting sanctions are spilling over to the global economy, inflating costs for key commodities like wheat and fertilizers.

PHOTOGRAPH BY JORGE GUERRERO, AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

The earlier crises sparked international food riots, toppled governments in Madagascar and Haiti, and ignited the Arab Spring uprisings in the Middle East. The world is even more volatile today, says Husain, whose agency last year fed 128 million people—the most in its 60-year history.

“In 2008 we didn’t have COVID,” he says. “We didn’t have war in Yemen or Syria or in Ethiopia or northeast Nigeria. Because of COVID, governments are tapped out; debt levels are as high as they have ever been in many poor countries. Inflation is at record levels. Even before Ukraine was invaded food prices were at 10-year highs and fuel prices were at seven-year highs. You add job losses and income losses combined with high prices, people are getting squeezed from both sides. This crisis couldn’t have come at a worse time.”

The WFP is planning to feed a record 140 million people this year, including more than three million displaced Ukrainians, as well as some 44 million others in 28 countries teetering on the brink of famine. Many of those nations depend on grain imports from Ukraine. These include Yemen, Afghanistan, Syria, Ethiopia, and nearly a dozen other countries in the Middle East and Africa.

To make matters worse, WFP’s costs spiked after the invasion, rising by $71 million per month and creating a $10 billion shortfall for the coming year. It’s forced them to begin rationing food supplies to the people who need it most.

A bigger threat looms

Currently some 13.5 million tons of wheat and 16 million tons of corn from last year’s harvest in Ukraine and Russia are stuck because of the war and sanctions. Some of that shortfall could be made up with higher exports from Australia or India, both of which had bumper wheat crops last year. But it’s the fate of this year’s crop in Ukraine that has economists worried.

Wheat is loaded onto a bulk carrier at the Port of Geelong in Geelong, Victoria, Australia, on March 4. Wheat prices have soared to the highest level since 2008 on mounting fears of a global shortage as a result of Russia's war on Ukraine.

PHOTOGRAPH BY CARLA GOTTGENS, BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY IMAGES

“We’re not just losing six million tons of grain,” from last year’s harvest in Ukraine, says David Laborde, a senior analyst at the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington, D.C., “but potentially 60 million tons. Losing the next harvest will be a critical short that no one will be able to make up.”

And that’s not even the biggest potential problem, he says. Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus also export vast quantities of nitrogen and potassium fertilizers around the globe.

“The biggest threat the food system is facing is the disruption of the fertilizer trade,” Laborde says. “Wheat will impact a few countries. The fertilizer issue can impact every farmer everywhere in the world, and cause declines in the production of all food, not just wheat.”

The fertilizer market was already in turmoil prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Belarus potash exports were under sanctions after that country’s government forced a Ryanair flight to land last year and arrested a dissident onboard. COVID-19 disrupted global shipping and supply chains. Last year Hurricane Ida knocked out two large fertilizer plants along the Gulf Coast of the United States that have struggled to return to production capacity, while fire destroyed a plant in North Carolina. Many European makers reduced production of nitrogen fertilizers after the price of natural gas—a major ingredient—skyrocketed last year. European, South American, and African countries are heavily dependent on imported fertilizers from the Black Sea region.

Adding to the situation, global stockpiles of wheat, corn, and soybeans are at their lowest in more than a decade, says Laborde, while export bans that caused such massive market disruptions in 2008 are starting to crop back up. Already last autumn Russia banned exports of fertilizer; China, another major exporter, has too. In 2021 China went on a major grain- and soy-buying spree to rebuild its own stocks, as well as its pork industry, which lost an estimated 100 million pigs to an outbreak of African swine flu. Earlier this year, China announced it was anticipating its worst wheat crop in history, and independent experts have confirmed its poor condition. China is expected to import more grains this year as well, just to meet demand, says Arnaud Petit, executive director of the International Grains Council, which monitors grain trade around the globe.

“The grain market is tighter than in 2008 or 2013,” Petit says. Because of the high demand from growing populations and changing diets, “we are not expecting­ any rebuilding of stocks over the next five years. So any climate shocks or conflict will have an impact.”

All of which makes a good harvest in the rest of the world all the more important.

“What we can’t afford now is a major drought in Kazakhstan, Europe, or Argentina,” says IFPRI’s Laborde. “Markets will explode. I don’t want to paint a bleak picture. If the planet will be generous to us this year, we should be okay. But a bad shock right now could bring us to the verge of a major food crisis.”

More red flags

Jerry Hatfield spent the last 30 years studying such events as director of USDA’s National Laboratory for Agriculture and the Environment in Ames, Iowa. The nation’s pre-eminent agricultural climatologist, now retired, is seeing red flags in several parts of the world.

“If we get a climate shock in one of the world’s breadbaskets this year it will be catastrophic,” says Hatfield. “It will make 2008 and 2012 pale by comparison.”

One of those is in Hatfield’s backyard. “All across the Midwest we are on the shoulder of a dry period like we saw in the 1950s, maybe even the 1930s,” Hatfield says. “I’m not saying Dust Bowl yet. But it’s not out of the question.”

“I think we’re in for some real production shocks on a global basis,” he warns.  “We have political turmoil, climate turmoil, supply chain issues getting fertilizer and fuel. I mean, what else could go wrong?”

Many U.S. farmers are already feeling the pinch. Justin Bruch spent seven years dealing with supply chain issues as a corporate farmer in Ukraine, managing up to 60,000 hectares (148,000 acres) before coming back home in 2014 after Russia invaded Crimea and the Donbas regions. He now heads an agricultural venture capital firm in Omaha, Nebraska, while helping his brother run the family farm near Emmetsburg, Iowa.

The price of nitrogen fertilizer has more than doubled, Bruch says. Farming friends in Brazil tell him they’re afraid they won’t get the fertilizer they need. One of his friends in Iowa, afraid of running out of diesel, purchased a tanker truck so he could take delivery of all his fuel for the year. Bruch himself can’t locate a center-pivot wheel anywhere—a critical spare part during the irrigation season. More alarmingly, he says, soil moisture ahead of planting is as low as he’s seen it in a long time.

“A friend of mine dug down five feet the other day to fix an irrigation line,” Bruch says. “He told me it was gunpowder dry all the way down. If we run into a situation where Brazil is short on fertilizer, Ukraine is not producing food, and a U.S. drought, this could get ridiculous.”

History repeating itself?

Still, Bruch’s immediate concern is for his friends still farming in Ukraine. He tried to convince his former agronomist, Vladimir Bubnov, to come to the United States days before the invasion, but the Ukrainian refused. Bubnov now runs Bruch’s former operation near Lviv, and after rescuing family members from the war zone is preparing to plant the farm. He’s in a better position than Jonathan Clibborn; Bubnov emails that they have enough supplies to seed the farm this spring, and as long as the war doesn’t reach them, he says they should be able to harvest their crops. But he’s less optimistic about the farmers further east.

“The land that is under war activities—none of it will be planted in my opinion,” Bubnov writes. “And with current weather situation (knowing that most of the area is south and southeast) very soon it will be too late to plant anyway. All this will decrease total potential export capacity of grain and even if we, as a country, produce a bit less than usual—how will it be shipped? Sea port infrastructures are getting destroyed and railway capacity is not enough for big quantities of grain anyway.”

Still, Bubnov, a proud Ukrainian who grew up near Kyiv, is doing everything he can to grow food for his country, just like Clibborn is doing for his adopted homeland.   

Clibborn has been speaking with people in the east of the country. “The Russians are blowing up grain elevators,” he says they tell him. “They are hitting cold storage facilities. There are even reports of them destroying farm equipment. There’s a very targeted approach to what they are doing.”

The situation sounds eerily similar to the Holodomor—the man-made famine orchestrated by Josef Stalin in the early 1930s to crush Ukrainian resistance to farm collectivization. Stalin ordered the Soviet army to strip Ukrainian peasants of whatever food stores they had—even their pets. An estimated 3.9 million people died.

“The parallels are frightening,” says Clibborn.  “It’s really hard to comprehend, but that’s what’s happening.” He sent his wife and kids to stay with his family in Ireland, but he worries about his wife’s relatives in villages of eastern Ukraine.

“I completely believe in Ukraine,” Clibborn says. “It’s deplorable what the Russians are doing here, but the defiance and will of the people is just incredible. People say the Ukrainian army is only 200,000 enlisted men. But really it’s an army of 36 million. Everyone who is still here is doing something on some scale to assist in the defense of the country. I’m not a soldier. This is how we help. We get the farm planted so we can feed the people of Ukraine, and after that, the rest of the world.”

Clibborn pauses for a second, and then adds, “You know, Putin has done more for Ukraine than any of our presidents. The veil is off and everyone is united. Western Ukraine never forgot what the Russians did to these people in the Holodomor. The eastern side could have gone either way. But now, no one has any doubt. The country is unified and this will make a nation of it.”

 

[F250 28760]

I read about the fertilizer problem earlier today.

Considering the problems from Covid, Global Supply Chain issues, global inflation, O&G, and agriculture problems due to the Russian invasion, I can only say...

[Parliament 14225]

9 hours ago, atomheartbevo said:

I posted an interview with Peter Zeihan in the Ukraine thread where he talks about agriculture and fertilizer, and in another interview, he said that the thing that keeps him up at night is the fertilizer issue.

Everybody is laser-focused on Ukraine producing so much grain, etc. and how the Russians trying to destroy grain supplies or shut down Ukrainian exports, but he mentioned that people are oblivious to the fertilizer issue - Russia being a major producer of fertilizers and China's potash fertilizer issues.  As he said in an interview, fertilizer is not "sexy" and people just don't realize its importance.

On the one hand, pretty doom-and-gloom - he thinks that if the war keeps up and China and other countries start or continue to have fertilizer issues, you could see a shit-ton of people in the world starving in short amount of time (just a few years) going into the hundreds of millions or more, because their agriculture relies so heavily on cheap and available fertilizer.  But on the other hand, he nailed the year on when Russia would fully invade Ukraine, and he's been doing a solid job of tracking Russia's (and China's) depopulation issue and I can't find too much fault with what he's saying on fertilizer/agriculture.

I love Zeihan, but he's prone to hyperbole; especially when it comes to agriculture.  Farmers are incredibly adaptable and will narrow the gap quite a bit.  Seems Zeihan is taking what we see now and just extrapolating all the way out.  We will come up with at least some fixes.

9 hours ago, atomheartbevo said:

North America is better equipped to weather the storm than Europe/Asia/Africa.

While a lot of Asian countries could probably get by, China is fucked.  They import a lot of food.  Way too much food.  Their olds better start dying off faster (I guess they will if things go south).

The US exports like 1/3 of the food we produce.  Might run short of imported bananas or (gasp) avacados, but we'll be fine.

[Moby Ric 2058]

The wife deals with the Chinese shipping stuff constantly.  She tells me last night that the Chinese have effectively shut down 3 major ports.  Nothing in or out.  The Chinese government is not mentioning it, talking about it etc.  However she was talking to her people and it is a real problem that is growing by the day.  Over 500 ships are anchored off these ports in China just waiting.  No conspiracy, but with covid and now this shit, it is really looking like China is playing the long game and that these moves are done with intent.

[Parliament 14225]

Why have they shut down those ports?  Covid lockdown?

[Johnny Sack 8397]

 

[Vegas64 673]

38 minutes ago, Parliament said:

Why have they shut down those ports?  Covid lockdown?

I assume the Zero-COVID policy, which is also why Shanghai has been on lockdown and the army has been deployed to keep the peace as there is a shortage of food and restlessness growing.

[Parliament 14225]

1 hour ago, Johnny Sack said:

 

Please refresh my memory.  What movie is that from?

[Celery Man 20929]

 

[Macanudo 12974]

9 minutes ago, Parliament said:

Please refresh my memory.  What movie is that from?

1st Back to the future.   Is the 2nd Demolition Man?

[Ag with kids 581]

10 minutes ago, Macanudo said:

1st Back to the future.   Is the 2nd Demolition Man?

Red Dawn

[52-80 19140]

22 hours ago, Aqua Buddha said:

Kinda cloaky but some people will tell you that Fed monetary policy causes this and that's not the case.  We have a shortage of everything and changing interest rates of government spending won't change that.

Its not mutually exclusive. 
 

When theres a surplus of liquidity (from easy lending) people have apparent spending power and things become nominally higher priced. 
 

Nothing cloaky about basic economic principles thats been established for a century

[52-80 19140]

I mean, its literally baked into dudes statement - “theres a shortage of everything”. 

Did everything stop being grown or seeded or mined or assembled or manufactured at the same time?  Did the world double its population overnight?  
 

[Blotto 23484]

12 hours ago, Immaculate Vibes said:

They’ve been planning ahead. 
 

 

I'd be interested to know how large those reserves are in comparison to the amount of food they import annually. In other words, those percentages sound pretty high (69%, 60%, 51% etc...) but how much time does it buy them if their is a drastic reduction in food available for import? 

[Bigbend1812 12915]

[Immaculate Vibes 114]

30 minutes ago, Blotto said:

I'd be interested to know how large those reserves are in comparison to the amount of food they import annually. In other words, those percentages sound pretty high (69%, 60%, 51% etc...) but how much time does it buy them if their is a drastic reduction in food available for import? 

It said their wheat stockpiles could meet demand for 18 months with no new input. 

[Aqua Buddha 14581]

1 hour ago, 52-80 said:

Its not mutually exclusive. 
 

When theres a surplus of liquidity (from easy lending) people have apparent spending power and things become nominally higher priced. 
 

Nothing cloaky about basic economic principles thats been established for a century

Supply and demand matter far more.  While easy money may prop up demand, what is happening now is all supply related.

[52-80 19140]

6 minutes ago, Aqua Buddha said:

Supply and demand matter far more.  While easy money may prop up demand, what is happening now is all supply related.

A basic tenet of economics is that everything is connected. Nothing happens in isolation.  

Non-essential things like new apparel, cars, admission tickets should be quite elastic — people can live without seeing an Ed Sheeren concert — but they have *all* gone up in price.  Because theres more money flying around. 

Supply of things should be secular.  Maybe global climate harmed agriculture. Maybe a some resourceful countries disrupted its raw materials.  Youre saying the supply of everything in the world just coincidentally dropped together?
 

[atomheartbevo 89618]

On 4/7/2022 at 7:47 AM, Parliament said:

I love Zeihan, but he's prone to hyperbole; especially when it comes to agriculture.  Farmers are incredibly adaptable and will narrow the gap quite a bit.  Seems Zeihan is taking what we see now and just extrapolating all the way out.  We will come up with at least some fixes.

I'm not fond of his views that Ukraine will not win and/or survive, and that Russia will eventually win out.  I get where he is coming from to an extent, but for someone who is talking about Russia being on death's door fairly soon (relatively speaking) and who understands the demographic problems that Russia is having right now (and who correctly predicted that Russia was running out of runway in terms of when to invade), Ukraine is bleeding Russia far harder and faster than Afghanistan did.  The Russian Army is a shadow of what the Red Army was in the 80s (and the Red Army basically collapsed circa 1991).

In terms of agriculture, I think agriculture can adapt as well, but I think he is taking the view that a lot of countries will not pay attention to this until it's too late.  China does have the advantage of planning a lot farther out, and is willing to spend the money to make sure it has food, and will restrict certain things (fertilizer) to protect itself, and this is going to leave a lot of countries in the lurch.

I can see a lot of smaller countries suffering, and maybe it's going to be more those countries than say China (which is what he keeps predicting will suffer the most).

 

[atomheartbevo 89618]

On 4/7/2022 at 8:36 AM, Moby Ric said:

The wife deals with the Chinese shipping stuff constantly.  She tells me last night that the Chinese have effectively shut down 3 major ports.  Nothing in or out.  The Chinese government is not mentioning it, talking about it etc.  However she was talking to her people and it is a real problem that is growing by the day.  Over 500 ships are anchored off these ports in China just waiting.  No conspiracy, but with covid and now this shit, it is really looking like China is playing the long game and that these moves are done with intent.

On 4/7/2022 at 8:55 AM, Parliament said:

Why have they shut down those ports?  Covid lockdown?

COVID stuff.  Lot of talk about their vaccines are shit and so they are keep going through lockdowns because it's tearing through their population and filling up their hospitals and crippling factories. 

I have no idea how much of that is true, as it feels like things are staying in stock, etc. that were out of stock the previous year or two, but then again, we don't have the same pressures on people buying stuff here in the US because of COVID like they were in 2020/2021.

[atomheartbevo 89618]

On 4/7/2022 at 7:47 AM, Parliament said:

The US exports like 1/3 of the food we produce.  Might run short of imported bananas or (gasp) avacados, but we'll be fine.

If shit hits the fan, I can totally see the US/Canada/Mexico covering each others' backs, so bananas and avocados will be okay (barring cartel shenanigans).

We will absolutely keep Mexico (and maybe even points farther south) stable as far as food, as we don't want them falling apart and swarming our border.  We have the rail/trucking/shipping system to do this efficiently.

Where things get interesting is Africa and the Middle East.   If things really go to shit there, I'm not sure if the US and Europe could really do much to help both in terms of military but also food-wise.  We couldn't just setup a small bases here and there, because if there's widespread famine, people could swarm those things.

[Immaculate Vibes 114]

 

[Immaculate Vibes 114]

12 hours ago, atomheartbevo said:

COVID stuff.  Lot of talk about their vaccines are shit and so they are keep going through lockdowns because it's tearing through their population and filling up their hospitals and crippling factories. 

I have no idea how much of that is true, as it feels like things are staying in stock, etc. that were out of stock the previous year or two, but then again, we don't have the same pressures on people buying stuff here in the US because of COVID like they were in 2020/2021.

The usual caveats about the veracity of Twitter posts apply here, but it would appear it’s not going too well. 
 

 

Edited April 9, 2022 by Immaculate Vibes

[Immaculate Vibes 114]

18 minutes ago, Immaculate Vibes said:

The usual caveats about the veracity of Twitter posts apply here, but it would appear it’s not going too well. 
 

 

From the replies there. Creepy

 

[RockyMountainHighHorn 890]

I see no one talked about the Twinkie shortage of 2017, that really started it all. Should have seen the signs then. Except dunkaroos came back so it clouded the meek outlook. 

[DefinitelyNotHollywoodColt 12301]

1 hour ago, Immaculate Vibes said:

From the replies there. Creepy

 

is that 'real'? doesn't matter, we are living in s simulation.

and @PenelopeWitherspoon covid has made you super angry/borderline insane. why don't you take a break from it all?

[Immaculate Vibes 114]

43 minutes ago, DefinitelyNotHollywoodColt said:

is that 'real'? doesn't matter, we are living in s simulation.

and @PenelopeWitherspoon covid has made you super angry/borderline insane. why don't you take a break from it all?

all that hate’s gonna burn her up. She claimed I was on ignore before. Guess not any longer. 
 

Quite a thread here. More Chinese Covid craziness. This seems legit. 
 

 

Edited April 9, 2022 by Immaculate Vibes