If it matters: My cousin is plant manager at a meat packing company. He told the family to prepare for substantial price hikes, and recommended we buy and freeze all we can now. Mainly as hedge against prices, not massive shortages. His opinion is that the prices could reduce a lot of demand.
Anecdote: I stocked up on briskets at around $1.00/lb. two weeks ago. Checked yesterday (same store) and they were $8.00/lb. Each wrapped brisket in the meat section cost over $100.00. An eightfold increase is reason to worry (imo).
Mr. Middon and I were talking the other day. Whenever I can get beef or pork or chicken for a somewhat reasonable price (or probably even if the price is not that good), I’ll buy several pounds and can it up. When I can a bushel of tomatoes in late summer, I’ll do at least one batch of beefy bolognese sauce.
If meat prices go up as I expect them to, we’ll have a few dozen relatively inexpensive meals on my canned goods shelves. If not, well, we’ll still have a nice cache of convenience foods for dinners.
I seriously doubt that we will get to a point when there actually is not enough food for everybody, we could probably lose 75% of our production, and still have enough to go around. Not in the next year or so, anyway.
But prices going up as it becomes scarce, that is a very rational concern.
Are you talking about a decrease in global influence or the Balkanization of the United States into some new configuration of our component states? Because I assure you, the latter would not be in ANYONE’S best interest and is unlikely to happen with a of violent “lashing out”.
It didn’t at the time, unless it made someone you knew very sick. I remember 1968 quite well; the Hong Kong flu was on the news (but a relatively minor item, given everything else that happened that year) but nobody reacted to it in a way remotely like how we’re reacting to Covid-19. The schools stayed open (mine sure did), no primaries or political conventions were canceled or postponed (more’s the pity), people kept on going to baseball, football, and basketball games, no businesses shut down. For most people it was just one more thing on the news. I think it may have even gotten a mention in Peanuts.
Let’s not forget that we are the same country that had Barack Obama as President just four years ago. We are bigger than Donald Trump and we are better than Donald Trump.
Just to update my own vague sense of impending dread … how about if we throw a bank collapse into the mix?
“… in December, the Financial Stability Board estimated that, for the 30 ‘global systemically important banks,’ the average exposure to leveraged loans and CLOs was roughly 60 percent of capital on hand.”
I didn’t know this term, but CLO’s are basically the same sort of investment instrument as the CDO’s that triggered the 2008 collapse, except they’re packages of business loans, not residential. Given the impact of COVID-19 quarantines on smaller businesses, it will be no surprise if a lot of these end up worthless.
Which part of " . . .promise me you are preparing to get through this Winter. . ." made you think I was encouraging apathy and fatalism?!? Read for comprehension.
I agree with this. Ever since I first heard of the Truth and Reconciliation committees in South Africa and Rwanda I’ve been saying that this is what the USA needs.
But we also have to acknowledge that it’s human nature to respond to scarcity by trying to reserve what is available for one’s own. We will define our tribe as widely as the available resources allow. But we will continue to have divisions as long as the incredible wealth of our country is allowed to be hoarded by the few, leaving huge numbers in poverty.
We need to redefine the American Dream. To be not “Every generation of a successful family will be more successful than the last” but “In every generation of Americans the bottom rung of poverty will be raised up.” When we get to a point like Norway or Germany, where the people on the lowest rung are always well fed, always warm and dry, always clothed and educated, THEN we will have achieved a society to be proud of.
I always thought that the American Dream was, or ought to be, “We can have a country in which people of all sorts of religious and other beliefs can live together, as equals, and without trying to kill each other.”
What has happened and the response ought to be chilling. We have demonstrated serious and exploitable flaws to our strategic competitors and sadly we don’t care enough to be aware of them much less to take action to fix them.
That said, I’m not sure how the rest of 2020 will go.