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Fuel shortages


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3 minutes ago, ranger_syntax said:

If we are short by 100k then the significance of our glorious departure is very low.

 

Clearly something much bigger going on.

 

Very recently I was reading about the massive increase in the cost of container shipping from Shanghai to Los Angeles.  The charts are mind boggling. I read that this was driven by increased demand for goods in the U.S.A. since March 2020. I wonder if this driver shortage is also driven by increased demand for delivered goods in the U.K.

 

Either way I hope people see sense and let the market sort itself out. The feeble minded calls for planning are too painful to stand for long.

A very hackneyed argument, that. 2008 not teach you anything?

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1 hour ago, ranger_syntax said:

If we are short by 100k then the significance of our glorious departure is very low.

 

Clearly something much bigger going on.

 

Very recently I was reading about the massive increase in the cost of container shipping from Shanghai to Los Angeles.  The charts are mind boggling. I read that this was driven by increased demand for goods in the U.S.A. since March 2020. I wonder if this driver shortage is also driven by increased demand for delivered goods in the U.K.

 

Either way I hope people see sense and let the market sort itself out. The feeble minded calls for planning are too painful to stand for long.

I haven’t checked the latest container prices for moving goods from China to the UK but it ballooned up to circa £12-13k last year and held at that level for quite some time.  The normal cost would be circa £2-3k.  
 

For reference, the reasons for that were more down to the pandemic and the restrictions on air travel.   Whereas normally there would be tranches of goods moving in the hold of commercial aircraft, this was no longer an option and thus drove up the cost of sea freight. 
 

There were also massive problems at ports where containers were taking much much longer to be recycled due to the additional safety protocols required to manage covid risk.

 

So the spike in demand and the lack of available containers mostly led to that situation. 

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11 hours ago, Bill said:

In the end it's the only way it will get sorted.  

 

When I referred to 2008 what I meant was that the banking crisis was never resolved - the massive injection of public money merely meant that the problem was shifted on to nation states, leaving a huge gap in public finances. So who pays for that? Not the market for sure. As I speak, more two-bit energy companies with silly names are going bust, an other rail franchise (London south East) has been 'nationalised.'  The market is not doing a very efficient job is it?

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13 minutes ago, alexscottislegend said:

When I referred to 2008 what I meant was that the banking crisis was never resolved - the massive injection of public money merely meant that the problem was shifted on to nation states, leaving a huge gap in public finances. So who pays for that? Not the market for sure. As I speak, more two-bit energy companies with silly names are going bust, an other rail franchise (London south East) has been 'nationalised.'  The market is not doing a very efficient job is it?

On the contrary, the "market" is doing an excellent job, as it always does, but there are consequences and sometimes these can be painful for some. The market is currently clearing out energy companies who cut corners by refusing to buy their gas sufficiently forward so that they had some control over the shock of the increased commodity price.

 

You might want take your red specs off long enough to consider what those investment banks contributed to personal and state pensions, insurance premiums, and the wider economy during the decade before the banking crisis. Were you complaining then? When banks took risks that were ever more beyond their collateral, it was the markets that brought it to an end, not governments. The decision to bail out the collapsed credit system was one taken by states in their own interest - perhaps you would have preferred to see economies crash and throw everyone into a generation of poverty, just to get the satisfaction of seeing banks go to the wall? You forget that the banking industry also played a significant role in acquiring the debt of other failed banks.

 

It's not the job of the markets to be benign moral arbiters of "fairness. If that's what you think they should be then you're even further from reality than I thought.

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2 hours ago, alexscottislegend said:

When I referred to 2008 what I meant was that the banking crisis was never resolved - the massive injection of public money merely meant that the problem was shifted on to nation states, leaving a huge gap in public finances. So who pays for that? Not the market for sure. As I speak, more two-bit energy companies with silly names are going bust, an other rail franchise (London south East) has been 'nationalised.'  The market is not doing a very efficient job is it?

You are all over the place.

 

It's really difficult to make any sense of what you point is.

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2 hours ago, Bill said:

On the contrary, the "market" is doing an excellent job, as it always does, but there are consequences and sometimes these can be painful for some. The market is currently clearing out energy companies who cut corners by refusing to buy their gas sufficiently forward so that they had some control over the shock of the increased commodity price.

 

You might want take your red specs off long enough to consider what those investment banks contributed to personal and state pensions, insurance premiums, and the wider economy during the decade before the banking crisis. Were you complaining then? When banks took risks that were ever more beyond their collateral, it was the markets that brought it to an end, not governments. The decision to bail out the collapsed credit system was one taken by states in their own interest - perhaps you would have preferred to see economies crash and throw everyone into a generation of poverty, just to get the satisfaction of seeing banks go to the wall? You forget that the banking industry also played a significant role in acquiring the debt of other failed banks.

 

It's not the job of the markets to be benign moral arbiters of "fairness. If that's what you think they should be then you're even further from reality than I thought.

Where I have ever said that I expected markets to be arbiters of fairness? And of course I would not prefer to see economies go to the wall. You won't find too many modern economists saying 'leave it all to the markets'; I think the system itself will change - the condition of the Hegelian Dialectic.

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