Do You Believe In Shortages? On The Supply Crisis That Isn’t

Whether we’re talking about oranges, or silver, or microchips, or prices, or supply chain disruptions, and more, the shortages are…

(by Half Dollar) Remember when the price of crude oil dropped to something like negative-forty-bucks a couple of years ago?

Yeah, well, nobody ever paid me to fill up my vehicles or my fuel cans.

Funny how that worked out, isn’t it?

Or how about the ongoing $20ish price for silver on the futures market?

Ha!

Funny again.

Which brings me to something I’ve had on my radar for a couple of months now, oranges, for no other reason than to reconfirm my beliefs and working theories that anything and everything in the markets and in the economy is not only totally out-of-whack, but also extremely relative:

That, and reaffirming my feelings that the doom hype and the fearmongering are off the charts.

Plus, I’ve been known to eat an orange from time to time, so there’s that too.

But don’t take ‘Ol Half Dollar’s word for it, read the bad analysis for yourself using an example from Everybody’s Favorite Wannabe Alternative Media Website, published just yesterday (bold added for emphasis and commentary):

Orange juice futures squeezed to a near-record high ahead of another US Department of Agriculture’s crop report on Friday that will likely show tight global supplies will persist well into the new year.

Uh, sure.

Those “tight” supplies will “persist”, huh?

Perhaps in some less fortunate parts of the world, but the last time I checked, oranges were the primary ingredient in orange juice, and in my direct, recent personal experience, which spanned the generally Eastern half of the United States, not only is there no shortage of oranges, but real-world orange prices are not only stable but currently falling across the board.

For example, I took this picture in some random Walmart in Haines City, Florida, on November 23, 2022:

There were plenty of fresh California oranges to go around.

And just yesterday, December 7, 2022, Wifey bought 8 pounds of fresh oranges for a total of $5 here in Northwest Ohio:

Naturally, I rounded up the price for ease of typing.

Don’t judge.

Now, I mention the example of oranges to make a few points.

First, these nothingburgers are cooked up all the time, and using Everybody’s Favorite Wannabe Alternative Media Website as our baseline yet again, we can see that last year, it was that Pesky Frost in Brazil that was the culprit for The Great Orange Crisis of 2021, while this year, apparently, Florida got rocked by a hurricane which is supposedly bringing on The Even Greater Orange Crisis of 2022.

Of course, my sneaky suspicion is that some Dumb Gambler Wizard Trader placed a losing bet trade in the Rigged Casino market, and for spite, or with hopes of getting those options back in-the-money, or something, we get this kind of “talking the book” that we’re presented with as some sort of impending and ongoing crisis.

Furthermore, just check out the logic of the last sentence of the article that inspired me to write today (bold added for emphasis and commentary):

Tightening orange juice supplies will only increase prices at the supermarket and may cause affordability issues, forcing some consumers to scrap the nutritious drink for vitamin C pills.

Vitamin C pills?

Like, have you even heard of whole oranges, bro?

Or any other fruit or vegetable that contains a high amount of vitamin C?

Or what about other fruit juices that either contain, or are fortified with, vitamin C?

Or tomato juice?

Or tomatoes:

Meh.

Doesn’t matter.

What matters is that the only people who actually pay Everybody’s Favorite Wannabe Alternative Media Website for various subscription tiers including permanently “coming soon” features for an edge in the markets deserve to have their trading accounts blow-up if not for the subscribers’ own incomprehensibly inconceivable ignorance than for directly willingly spoonfeeding the Beast.

The second point I want to make about the so-called “Orange Shortage” is that if one pays attention, there are super-duper awesome deals to be found all around, and not just on oranges, but on various foods, really, depending on actual market forces.

For example, over the last couple of weeks, we’ve found some great deals on fresh fruits and vegetables at our local Costco to include cranberries, grapes and mushrooms:

Those deals consisted of 2-pound bags of fresh cranberries for $2 per bag, 3-pound packs of fresh, imported grapes for $4.39 per pack, and 24-ounce packs of fresh, imported mushrooms (shown in the picture above as a half-pack, broken-down and frozen) for $0.97 per pack.

The overall point is that by adjusting purchases to where the deals are to be found and when they are to be found, not only can one eat well, but relatively inexpensively.

In other words, our year-past-expiration crackers that crunch & taste exactly like the day we bought them are well suited for cream cheese and, now, homemade cranberry sauce/spread:

Yum.

Yup.

Yeah.

I could make even more points, but my main point today is this: The Everything Shortage of the past two years is over.

Get over it.

Not only is the latest & greatest Xbox or PlayStation in stock everywhere, but there are bundle deals to be found on them too.

Monogramed perfume direct from YSL and overpriced handbags direct from Louis Vuitton can be purchased and home-delivered for free in just a couple of days.

Ugly sneakers costing hundreds of dollars from Italy, sent by way of France, find their way under the American Christmas Tree in The Rust Belt in less than two weeks.

And indeed, with micro-transactions making their way into the new Ram Trucks to increase payload capacity by way of a software feature “upgrade” or something, “Silicone Valley” might just have to be renamed “Silicone Glut” (video will play at appropriate timestamp): [embedded content]

Or maybe “Silicone Shills”.

And silver?

Don’t even get me started on the Fakes, Frauds, Phonies and Worse, much less the Silver “Advocates”.

And don’t get me started on That New Thing, either, which is The Same Old Tired Thing, as in, China & Russia coming to save the gold market, yet again.

You know those 30,000 Gazillion Tons Of China’s Gold Reserves that you can easily tally on the back of a dirty napkin in a smoky cowboy bar?

Or you know how Putin is riding that giant oil spill wave on the back of a grizzly bear that’s surfing the Sea of Dollar on a golden surfboard?

Um, yeah.

Kinda like that.

How ’bout them oranges…