(OPINION) Is it just me, or does it feel like America is running out of everything? I visited CVS last week to pick up some at-home COVID-19 tests. They’d been sold out for a week, an employee told me.
So I asked about paper towels. “We’re out of those too,” he said. “Try Walgreens.” I drove to a Walgreens that had paper towels. But when I asked a pharmacist to fill some very common prescriptions, he told me the store had run out.
“Try the Target up the road,” he suggested. Target’s pharmacy had the meds, but its front area was alarmingly barren, like the canned-food section of a grocery store one hour before a hurricane makes landfall.
The Atlantic is report ign that this is the economy now. One-hour errands are now multi-hour odysseys. Next-day deliveries are becoming day-after-next deliveries. That car part you need? It’ll take an extra week, sorry. The book you were looking for? Come back in November.
The baby crib you bought? Make it December. Eyeing a new home-improvement job that requires several construction workers? Haha, pray for 2022. The U.S. economy isn’t yet experiencing a downturn akin to the 1970s period of stagflation. This is something different, and quite strange.
Americans are settling into a new phase of the pandemic economy, in which GDP is growing but we’re also suffering from a dearth of a shocking array of things—test kits, car parts, semiconductors, ships, shipping containers, workers.
This is the Everything Shortage. Meanwhile, India is on the brink of an unprecedented power crisis. More than half of the country’s 135 coal-fired power plants are running on fumes – as coal stocks run critically low.
According to BBC News, In a country where 70% of the electricity is generated using coal, this is a major cause for concern as it threatens to derail India’s post-pandemic economic recovery.
This crisis has been in the making for months. As India’s economy picked up after a deadly second wave of Covid-19, demand for power rose sharply. Power consumption in the last two months alone jumped by almost 17%, compared to the same period in 2019. At the same time, global coal prices increased by 40% and India’s imports fell to a two-year low.
The country is the world’s second-largest importer of coal despite being home to the fourth-largest coal reserves in the world. Power plants that usually rely on imports are now heavily dependent on Indian coal, adding further pressure to already stretched domestic supplies.
