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October 23, 2022

If you think the price of energy and food has reached the limit, I have bad news for you: All signs are it’s going to be much worse. Hot Air described the coming supply chain wreck.. Water levels on the Mississippi are tied with an all-time low. And that portends a bitter winter for consumers:

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Just under half (47%) of all grain is moved by barge, according to the USDA. Approximately 5.4 million barrels of crude and 35% of thermal coal are moved on the Mississippi.

That’s just a small amount of Mississippi traffic, A great deal more than grain and coal normally is shipped by barge on the Mississippi.

That domestic decline in shipping is compounded by the mess in those ports bringing in foreign products. To avoid the snarl in California’s ports (compounded by California’s labor laws and air-quality regulations), ships are being diverted and unloaded in New York and New Jersey.  Those ports offer far less unloading capacity than those in Los Angeles and Long Beach.

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But transferring cargo to East Coast ports has also caused its own set of problems. The ports themselves are smaller in scale than either Long Beach or LA, and can’t hold as many ships or get them offloaded and cleared for the next cargo to come in. That is causing significant delays in on-time reliability. In other words, there’s a pretty decent chance that what you ordered may not get to the United States anywhere near the date they quoted you for its arrival. Once your container does arrive, it may sit in the boat for a while.

Even the next-tier port in Savannah is overwhelmed with more traffic than it can service, and once those ships are unloaded there’s insufficient storage and labor to move the products out to retailers and ultimately consumers.

The supply chain problem is likely to get even worse because the threatened railroad workers strike has not been settled but simply postponed to November 19.

Logistics managers are dusting off their plans for a possible railroad strike in November that could wreak havoc on the supply chain and cost the U.S. economy up to $2 billion a day. 

Do you imagine our economy is so strong we can afford another $2 billion loss per day? I don’t think so. Inflation is already destroying the poor and middle class. You’ve probably noticed this yourself, but Don Surber details the food price horror story: 

Vegetables up 40.2%