When I recently made the suggestion that the way individuals can help ease the pressure on inflation is to consider whether they really need to buy that particular thing, it's because the real issue is scarcity.
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The global economy, as a whole, seems to be at least a bit short of pretty much everything that matters to it at the moment.
Compared to demand, there are insufficient flows of energy (oil and gas in particular for those who remain reliant on them), labour shortages (whether its cheap or skilled), insufficient food available to those who must import it, an as-yet inadequate supply of minerals and metals to make new tech with, and even resources such as neon gas which is used in lithography machines to make silicon chips for all sorts of products or gadgets has had its supply dramatically reduced.
The solution for political leaders is to find more of these commodities and resources from somewhere, or to encourage economic activity that generates more of them, or to work rapidly towards replacing them with something different, and hopefully better, which serves the same purpose or function.
In the case of energy, the current shortfall compared to demand has really helped nations who import energy realise how much of a strategic strength or weakness their decisions can create.
For Europe at least, it has also highlighted the advantage of those renewables (and any means of storage necessary) being sourced from more desirable locations too (whether that's domestically or from a friendly nation, hopefully nearby).
It's also highlighting how lazy certain previous governments have been - throughout most of the world - to actually get this done before being forced into it (or forced to temporarily go backwards in terms of emissions reductions, as is the case with anyone returning to coal for electricity production for example, such as Germany).
When it comes to vehicles, there are intensely complex, and usually international, supply chains which not only need transport and labour themselves, but also materials. If there's anything that becomes difficult to get hold of it's a major problem for production.
Even when you specialise in electric vehicles it's still not easy to meet demand. In fact, it might make things even harder. Tesla CEO Elon Musk admitted in a mid-2022 interview that, "both Berlin [Germany] and Austin [Texas, USA] factories, are gigantic money furnaces right now," as these new plants both struggle to scale up production as intended. Consequently, wait times are also up.
Whatever vehicle you may have been considering buying though, the wait time will probably surprise you. And if you're looking on the used market hoping that depreciation would make your desired option more affordable, well that may not be the case for quite some time either. Fewer new vehicles in any given market (around the world) also means fewer trade-ins and slower fleet replacements in those markets, and so that also means a reduced supply of used vehicles. In some places like the USA for instance prices for used vehicles have gone up noticeably (in relation to what they were, they're still less than new, in most cases anyway).
Labour shortages are occurring for various reasons. Partly it's the boomer generation retiring faster than they're being replaced. In 2001 Australia's birth rate hit its lowest point before the Baby Bonus was introduced, and how old are those kids now? Other Western nations are experiencing the same challenge (plus workers are realising they have more power to demand better conditions).
China meanwhile set itself up as the world's cheap-labour factory and for them, COVID is far from over. It's not over here either, but whereas we appear to have decided that vaccination saves enough lives (not as many as lockdowns and masks since we lost more Australians to the virus in the first half of 2022 than all of 2020 and 2021 combined, but that's another argument) China insists on waiting until it can have its own approved mRNA vaccine because they refuse to accept one from the West. So lockdowns have been their only option and whole cities have been shut down for weeks or months, and then scaling production back up afterwards also takes time for certain supply chains.
