[joe_the_user]

Let's say that all Banana growers were shut down for 8 months and during that time all existing supply was bought up that were sitting on store shelves.

-- But chip manufacturers didn't shut down. That's even close to the immediate cause, which was that the anticipation of changed future demand on the part of other manufacturers lead to them decreasing and change future orders. If you're going to ELI5("explain this to me like a five year old"), at least give some reasonably analogous situation, jeesh.

I mean, I think people understand that supply takes some time to catch up with demand when you have a complex, interdependent economy. But the adjustment to this shock has taken longer than seems reasonable or seems like happened in the past so more data than X has to adjust for Y which has to adjust for Z is appropriate.

[MarkSweep]

Some fabs did shutdown this year. One in Japan due to a fire and some in Texas due to power loss. I think both are back up and running, but it did not help to lose production.

https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/biz/archives/2021/03/30/200...

https://www.statesman.com/story/business/2021/04/30/austin-f...

[vkou]

I'd expect these shutdowns to be more-or-less randomly distributed across calendar years[1], and in aggregate, accounted for, on a macro level, in supply/demand projections.

[1] The examples you cited suffer from confirmation bias - a plant shutting down due to a fire when there isn't already a chip shortage, would not really make the news. And if it did, you wouldn't be actively looking for it!

[vidanay]

A closer analogy might be that all of the banana growers were told they should grow mangos, so the plowed under the banana trees and planted mangos.

[detaro]

Not that massively, but various plants had to shut down at various times, which really isn't helping matters. It's not just "misjudged demand", that would be relatively easy to fix or be limited to few sectors if everything otherwise ran at needed capacity.