[colechristensen]

So what is actually going on? Supply issues everywhere while at the same time a booming stock market?

Is quantitative easing and unemployment protection turning our economy inside out?

It seems like prime time to deploy capital to build manufacturing and raw material capacity, is it all getting sucked into markets too abstracted from reality?

I’m getting a gut feeling that we’re running towards an entirely new kind of crash, worse but much weirder than have been experienced so far.

[skybrian]

I suspect it’s that we’ve underestimated how long it takes to increase capacity by removing bottlenecks. “Deploying capital” means building factories and stuff like that. When forecasts are good we don’t notice the lag, but during the pandemic, forecasts are usually bad.

But the problem with these macroeconomic abstractions is that they’re abstractions, and the actual problems are specific.

[CyanLite4]

Probably just temporary. New Orleans is having to rebuild their electric infrastructure. Over 2600 transformers destroyed in one day from one storm.

[ac29]

> Supply issues everywhere while at the same time a booming stock market?

Why is this surprising? They are both caused by high demand. Shortages suck, but completely selling out your products is one of the better problems to have for a company, because it means you are making a lot of money.

[colechristensen]

But it seems like the amount of stuff produced is going way down, not just selling or normal production runs.

[ac29]

At least in the US, GDP is at an all time high: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GDP

Companies are making a lot and selling a lot, which is one of the drivers of stock market gains.

[eurasiantiger]

You can’t just look at an aggregate statistic and expect it to tell you something.

You need to analyse what all goes into it and how that has changed.