Global Supply Chains Rattled by Winds of War Naked Capitalism

The Russian invasion of Ukraine and the subsequent sanctions imposed on Russia are adding strains to already disrupted global supply chains. This column introduces a new indicator to show that the war is already rattling global supply chains. It also argues that despite the modest share of Russia and Ukraine in global trade, the ramifications for global activity can be sizeable as both countries are among the top global exporters of energy products and raw materials that enter upstream in the production processes of several manufactured goods and that may be hard to substitute in the short term.

This article gets very economically into the weeds and I'm not smart enough to comprehend it without devoting like 30-60 minutes to digest it all and google all the acronyms, so if you're the type of person who loves that shit, then go have fun in there.

But just to bring something from the comments on nakedcapitalism to here:

"The trouble with global resources is you tend to think of them like pieces on a chess board. So when you see Neon being taken off the market, it is like seeing a knight being taken off a chessboard. But it is not like that at all. It is more like a Jenga tower. And yes, you can remove a fair number of pieces but take the wrong one out and down she comes. So you look at a problem in the supply chain and you try and work out the effects downstream as they work their way out. The west tells Russia no computer chips for you so Russia says no means to produce chips for you either. So trying to work out an arrangement may take months but in the meantime, a shortage of computer chips is now going to get much worse. Meanwhile here is a new problem to contend with in the supply chains – ‘An explosion in Texas has knocked out 20% of US LNG export capacity for at least three weeks’"

This is definitely a vibe I've gotten from the articles I go through, and that I think @granit has talked about a few times, which is that these people - scientists, analysts, journalists, whatever - view everything as atomized units, disconnected from everything else. As the comment above says, it's not like that at all - everything in the economy is, to a lesser or greater extent depending on the product (e.g. lego vs iron ore), related to everything else.

I sometimes feel like if, like, the entire agricultural system crashed over the course of a month due to some freak supervolcanic eruption or sun activity or something, and only 25% of the crops were being grown, that these analysts would be like "Oh, no worries, agricultural products only makes up (to make up a number) 6.7% of the global GDP! It'll suck, but the system will keep on ticking!" and then all make surprised pikachu faces when the entire global economy collapses because most of the workers in other industries start starving and dying, because everything is related to everything else.