[temac]

The thing is that you can not apply this method (suddenly stockpile because of anticipated shortage) globally. Now of course, putting gratuitous buffer everywhere would not be the panacea either. But some buffers may be needed to improve global resiliency.

One has to optimize to reduce fragility, but when massive chip (or anything else) shortages start to appear for extended periods it is obviously already way to late. And way too downstream if your strategy was just a punctual stockpile decided by a single company. Because that probably would have been impossible for everybody to apply this punctual strategy at the same time...

[nine_k]

One advantage of starting to stockpile ahead of a crisis is that production is not yet affected much by the crisis, and the total amount buffered could be larger.

[Sunfllowerfly]

They started stockpiling key components after the earthquake roughly 8 years ago. You could do this globally if everyone took the Toyota approach and only stockpiled components likely to suffer disruption.