Covid had nothing to do with the suez blocking, could easily have happened in 2019, and it's a very rare event

The Suez is being progressively widened and doubled. Previous blockages have been due to war, this type of blocking I think is the first since 1869. The powder keg of Israel is hardly new (indeed that's often been the cause of previous Suez blocking), collapsing south american countries isnt new either - Pinnochet? Peron?

Car factories may be in trouble, but consumers are not. There si plenty of new and old cars. Maybe not exactly the car you want, with your color of leather and level of trim.

Conflict was here long before globalisation, it has nothing to do with just in time delivery and smoothly running supply chain. Taiwan is a problem, because of chips. The world economy is stronger than some south american country. The "western world" is pretty much ok until someone decides to bomb us. Europe will switch from eating rice to more bread, and everybody is satiated. And the rest wasnt doing any better 50 years ago than is doing now. Except for obvious war zones, which pains me very much that in this age of abundance we have to deal with shitty psycho leaders and tribal mentality warriors.

What's interesting is that most people seem to expect that carrier to be on it's way within a day or two at best, my personal estimate is that this could take weeks to get resolved, if they decide to unload on the spot it might even take longer. This is not easy to fix at all.

Essentially they have one more shot at a quick fix: todays high tide. And if that doesn't do the trick they will have to come up with another solution but those will likely be much slower to put into effect, 224,000 tons (!) is a lot of mass to try to move, especially when stuck.

The chip shortage is completely normal supply and demand at work. Real markets are not magic faucets that supply an unlimited amount of things at a constant price.

We haven’t even hit government mandated rations for things and that was a matter of course several times throughout the 1900s.

The Suez Canal is a cost and time optimizer. There is an alternate path around South Africa that all of these mega ships are more than capable doing. Transport costs for some stuff and delays will go up, but that’s it. That won’t even impact people in the US in any meaningful way.