It’s not clear to me that any of the proposed causes are singly driving the shortages. The closest analogy in my mind is that our global production and logistics system is suffering from multiple shifting bottlenecks with secondary induced inefficiencies. Those new inefficiencies include JIT buffer exhaustion, related slowdowns, capacity reduction, priority inversions and resource contention.
> How can there be a supply chain crisis and a inventory surplus?
The supply chain crisis doesn't mean nothing is being supplied. It means that there are unknowable delays in everything. Your order may be made on time or delayed for several months. Once it's on a boat, it make take two weeks or four weeks to get across the Pacific, but then it might be unloaded right away or stuck on the boat for months. Once off the boat, it could be stuck at the port for a week or get transfered to a truck or rail right away.
When faced with all that uncertainty, you're going to have times where things start moving and too much stuff shows up at once. As well as times where you don't have much to sell.
All this article highlights is that when you don't order more, you run out. This is not political, it's simply a mismanagement of inventory, and not being prepared for a disaster where multitudes of an item will be needed.
> It's impractical to keep 12 months worth of supplies for manufacturing
They didn't need to. The initial disruption was only a few weeks. The problem is that once companies saw that there would be a shortage, they started buying up all the supplies they could to rapidly build up buffers, which increases the demand for those supplies worsening the shortage, which in turn means even larger buffers are required. It's a vicious cycle that all could have been avoided.
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