Groups Warning of Imminent Global Supply Chain System Collapse

From Red State.com (Oct. 2, 2021):

Under Joe Biden, it seems as though — in a very few months — we have been dragged into a boatload of crises.

But there’s another crisis that hasn’t been getting the attention it deserves from the media, and it’s affecting all of us whether you know it or not — and it’s about to get worse.

Cargo ships anchored off California and New York, and in rail yards and on trucking routes, shipping consumer goods are incredibly backlogged  due to a lack of manpower and pandemic restrictions to unload the goods. And now, there are warnings that the supply chain may be on the brink of collapse.

Shipping ports which normally only had one or two ships in dock waiting to be unloaded prior to the pandemic now have dozens lined up, waiting to be unloaded for up to four weeks, slowing the whole chain. In Los Angeles and Long Beach, as many as 73 vessels were waiting to be unloaded last month. The bottlenecks at the ports are also impacting railways and trucking. In Chicago — that has one of the largest rail yards — it was at one point backed up for 25 miles.

From Daily Mail:

At APM Terminals, a 484-acre facility boasts 12 miles of railroad tracks in Los Angeles, and the largest container site in the Western Hemisphere, Steven Trombley, the facility’s managing director, struggles to keep up with the increased influx of products and a shortage of workers.

‘It’s a headache. Cargo is sitting here longer than planned,’ Trombley told The Washington Post. ‘If I don’t get the cargo moving, then the next ship is not going to have space.’

At the facility, containers set to travel by rail commonly sit dockside for weeks, in contrast to just days, prior the pandemic.

Across from the headquarters building, trucks sit parked across a backlog of containers stacked 50 feet high, waiting to be driven east.

That’s caused prices to soar, for everything in the supply chain which, of course, will be passed on to the consumers.

Pre-Covid, the cost of shipping a container from China to the US’s West Coast was roughly $1,300. Today, that cost has risen exponentially, with the cost of transporting one container being roughly $35,000.

And the right to use these containers goes the highest bidder, hurting a host of retailers, especially small ones.

These retailers cannot afford the increasing cost to transport their inventory, and many have gone out of business.

Some have tried to turn to air freighters, and that’s overwhelmed that system and made everything more expensive there, as well.

“This has turned the economy upside down,” a logistics expert told the Daily Mail. Unions that represent shipping workers around the world are warning of a coming “global transport systems collapse.” [read more]