This will probably impact you.
Find out what you can do to protect yourself.
A Finer Mess
The shipping industry is going from bad to worse.
Insane Chinese lockdowns over the new Omicron strain have caused a cluster of ships to stall in front of almost all major Chinese shipping ports.
A tweet captured days ago shows an arial view.
My friend who works at the Long Beach, California port is in town right now, and said the reds are cargo ships (Iron, Gold, Wood, Oil, etc), and the green are container ships (Chinese products). Or vice versa, I don’t remember, we were drinking.
If the ships are stuck here, this means they can’t load up and come to your country.
You can read a great article about all of this here. Even though the article tried to put a positive spin on things in the end, as most national outlets do, they admitted that at best, this will cause prices to rise.
The situation was already bad, due to pileups in southern California ports which have yet to ease back to comfortable levels. Even when the containers are dropped off, there are very few trucks to take them away.
This is happening not only in Shanghai, but Shenzhen, China’s tech hub.
What should you, the consumer and the investor do about it?
Solutions?
As an investor, there are two things I would advise (even though this is not official advice) to combat this situation.
- Understand this should make commodity prices go even higher
- Avoid anything from China, if this wasn’t already obvious.
A lot of people in mainstream financial media, and even in some of the sharper-money podcasts I listen to are looking for ways to “play the bounce” in the Chinese stock market.
We will discuss this further in an upcoming podcast. But for now, just don’t.
As a consumer, we spoke earlier about stocking up on food. It may be time to stock up on all products too.
This isn’t the first time people have been buying their electronics and small machinery now as opposed to later, in anticipation of what may come.
We don’t know how long this lockdown may last. It appears China has gone in pretty deep here.
Although the US for example is moving a lot of their manufacturing to Mexico in the next 8-10 years, this will be a slow process. As much distrust and animosity there is between the US and China, billions of business a day is still being done between the two adversaries.
And do not forget all of the medicinal component which come from China as well.
Anything on this front you CAN get now should be gotten.
If your loved ones refuse to take action, you may need to do so on their behalf.
Again, no downside. If everything is fine, you simply put the stockpiled medicine into Grandma’s rotation.
Conclusion
I predict we will see a lot of Tweets from people who saw the writing on the wall months in advance, did nothing about it, and want to whine to the whole world about how expensive everything is now and how they can’t afford it.
Will you feel sorry for them when it happens?
— VP