Why are new cars so hard to find? Cars use computer chips — lots of them — and the shortages of chips have made it more difficult to produce vehicles. In turn, that has made it harder and more expensive to buy cars.

Is this really all the pandemic’s fault? The pandemic has certainly made supply and demand extremely volatile, shifting faster than the supply chain can adjust. But that came on top of decades of very lean inventories kept by companies to limit their costs. A dollar that a car company spends to warehouse computer chips as a hedge against supply chain troubles is a dollar that it cannot use on something else, including bonuses for executives or dividends for shareholders. Monopolistic tendencies also help explain shortages. Beef is scarce and prices are high, but this is largely because meatpackers have consolidated and eliminated capacity as a way to bolster prices and profitability. These sorts of choke points exist throughout the supply chain.

When will the shortages end? No one really knows, but there are good reasons to suspect that this will be with us well into 2022 and maybe longer. Shortages and delays are likely to affect this year’s Christmas and holiday shopping season by making it much harder to find key goods. A lot of companies ordered earlier, which is exacerbating the shortages, sending more surges of goods toward ports and warehouses.Prince Charles: “a ‘Dangerously Narrow’ Window to Tackle Climate Change”https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2021/10/24/prince-charles-claims-dangerously-narrow-window-tackle-climate-change/UK - Prince Charles issued a warning to the world days before leaders gather in the UK for crucial United Nations climate talks, saying there is a “dangerously narrow” window to tackle global warning. The heir to the British throne said Saturday that the summit, which starts October 31 in Glasgow, showed that “after far too long,” climate change and biodiversity loss are at last “of paramount importance to the world.” In a recorded message to the Saudi Green Initiative Forum, 72-year-old Charles — a long-time environmentalist — said the coronavirus pandemic “has highlighted that human health, planetary health and economic health are fundamentally interconnected.” “We now have a dangerously narrow window of opportunity in which to accelerate a green recovery, while laying the foundations for a sustainable future,” he said.