The HN is a very intelligent community, so I'd like to hear your thoughts out loud here. Do you guys think supply chains will move closer to home because of this pandemic? I'm hearing every narrative under the sun right now: "This will establish globalism even more", "No! This marks the abrupt END of globalism." What are your thoughts?
It's certainly going to shift manufacturing of some "essential items" for emergencies closer to home. But you can't do a knee-jerk reaction based on something like this. This is a very rare event and it would be foolish to annihilate your existing global supply chain over this. It will probably mean that countries (the smart ones anyways) will start to stockpile and ensure they have plans to follow in the event something like this happens again.
It's very hard to say right now. Money will be tight, so the pressure to buy the cheapest will remain. A lot of producers and consumer businesses will go bust. Shortage and oversupply will ping pong around for a while.
A lot depends what the effect of deaths is on politics - do any leaders get killed? Differential effect on older voters? Hopefully the number of those will be small enough not to matter.
Only with government intervention. If company A switches to more expensive domestic manufacturing while company B stays on the other side of the planet, B can undercut A. Next time there is a supply disruption, A will be able to beat out B, but A might be out of business by then. Government intervention would be required to even the field, maybe through tariffs or importation prohibitions.
An alternative would be for company A to appeal to the public (or business customers) to buy from them at a higher price because it helps keep society from being disrupted by supply chain interruptions. That might work short term but cheap prices seem to win out over concerns of societal wide benefits in the long run.
Certain products will be made and/or stock-piled closer to home. The effect this has on globalism overall depends on how various factions battle over narratives.
Guys, you freaking rock. Thank you for your informative and insightful responses. This is precisely why I referred to you guys before even receiving any responses as "intelligent".
Supply chains need to be more resilient, and that probably means making them more global rather than less.
A pandemic could originate in any country. Making things "at home" would turn out to be a bad idea if the pandemic originates at home. If that happened we would like to be able to get help from other countries.
