If you've been paying any attention, you'll know that COVID played havoc with the world economy and we're about to see even worse as a result of the Ukraine war and the Chinese Zero COVID policy.
Russia is one of the world's top exporters of several utterly crucial things: oil, natural gas, wheat, cooking oil, fertilizer, pesticides/herbicides, copper, platinum group metals, timber, and iron ore are just a few of the headlines. Russia will be exporting severely reduced amounts of all of those things this year. Ukraine is the world's 5th largest exporter of wheat and a major exporter of cooking oil and fertilizer.
The world is going to experience major energy and food shortages by the end of 2022, shortages the likes of which we haven't seen in several decades. There will be famine in poorer countries and much heightened food prices in rich countries. Agricultural output the world over will also decrease, because many countries, Brazil sticks out as a major one here (the world's #2 exporter of food), since they're extremely reliant on outside inputs to keep the food growing. Their farmland, while there is a lot of it, sucks and they need loads of fertilizer/pesticide/herbicide (among other things, like compounds to adjust the pH of their farmland) that they won't have enough of for a while.
Energy-wise, the world is going to see $100+/barrel prices (up from around $70 for most of the 2010s) for the foreseeable future. When you remember that the price of energy affects the price and amount produced of every other good and service you'll see why that's important.
On top of that, China has locked down several of the world's most productive cities. It's exports are already way down and probably won't get back to normal....ever. They're having loads of other problems (housing market has been tanking for almost a year now, household debt is higher than it's ever been, equity markets are less stable than they've ever been, unemployment is at an all time high, etc.) that will probably depress their economy for...again probably ever.
Depending on where you live, things are going to get pretty rough by the end of this year.
What are your thoughts?
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