Conversation

Search term “supply chain” is revealing. Strikes me that this is the first true supply chain crisis of the post-containerization era. It’s more unprecedented than Covid itself. Both qualitatively and quantitatively.
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Trade is at ~3x levels of gdp since last comparable global supply chain crisis (WW2) and works differently (containerization)
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Is it fair to conclude from trade to gdp ratio that on average everything has 58% foreign content? This metric understates the severity btw because it doesn’t include domestic supply chains. The non-local fraction of all consumption is probably ~90%.
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If you calculated trade to gdp ratio with cities as the unit of account, I bet you it would be ~95%. If you use households, it would go to about 99%. We basically only do the very last few steps of food manufacturing aka “cooking” ourselves.