You Better Wake Up, Because The Shortages Are Getting A Lot Worse
Francesco Abbruzzino, The Uncensored Report, LLC
A lot of people aren’t going to want to hear this. There are a lot of people out there that just want to hear that the future is going to be filled with rainbows, lollipops and unicorns, but that isn’t the truth. Months ago, I warned my readers that the global chip shortage wasn’t going to end any time soon and that it would deeply affect thousands of other industries, and that is precisely what is happening right now. Industry after industry is deeply hurting, and a lot of executives are really starting to freak out. Earlier this year, many among the blind optimists assured us that the chip shortage would be resolved by the end of 2021, but obviously that has not happened. In fact, the corporate media is now telling us that it is getting even worse. For example, the following comes from a Wall Street Journal article entitled “Global Chip Shortage ‘Is Far From Over’ as Wait Times Get Longer”…
Wait times for chip deliveries have continued to climb above a healthy threshold of 9-12 weeks. Over the summer, the wait stretched to 19 weeks on average, according to Susquehanna Financial Group. But as of October, it has ballooned to 22 weeks. It is longer for the scarcest parts: 25 weeks for power-management components and 38 weeks for the microcontrollers that the auto industry needs, the firm said.
Those numbers are unlike anything that we have ever seen before.
And we are rapidly getting to a point where some wait times will start to be measured in years. Manuel Schoenfeld placed an order for transmission chips in May 2021, and he is now being told that they will probably be delivered in May 2022…
Manuel Schoenfeld placed an order in May for transmission chips for the utility-monitoring devices made by his New York-based firm PowerX. He was told the chips would arrive by summer, then fall, then winter and now doesn’t expect to get them until May 2022.
“This is far from over,” Mr. Schoenfeld said.
How bad does it have to get before people start waking up?
The entire global economic system is experiencing stunning breakdowns on a widespread basis, and yet a lot of people still assume that everything is going to work out just fine somehow.
Due to a lack of chips, new vehicle production has dropped precipitously and dealers around the nation have seen their inventories drop to alarmingly low levels. As a result, demand for used vehicles has skyrocketed, and this has pushed used car prices to absolutely insane heights…
The 2019 Honda Civic that kicked off a used-car auction earlier this month would have been nothing special before the pandemic. But as automotive dealer Brad Wimmer watched, the online bidding quickly
became, to quote him, “bananas.”
As a new car, the Civic would have had a sticker price of around $21,000. But within seconds at the wholesale auction, the two-year-old model, with 4,000 miles, sold for $27,200.
If you have an old clunker that you don’t need anymore just sitting around, you may want to check what it is worth now.