Quote of the Day: Again, Status Quo Bias won't have it going forward....

Macro thinker Lynn Alden nails it in this month's newsletter:

"In recent years, many people spoke about how inflation was dead, and how commodity scarcity was a thing of the past.

The problem with an efficient-but-not-resilient global supply chain, is that it stops working once the smallest of exceptions occur. It could be a natural disaster of some sort, such as a virus. It could be a human disaster of some sort, such as a war. Or both, in the case of the 2020s decade thus far. A highly-levered and fragile system is not designed for such shocks.

And the problem with calling commodity scarcity a thing of the past, is that cheap commodity prices deter new investment in new commodity projects, resulting in stagnant supply, and eventually scarcity and higher prices. The commodity industry is notoriously boom-and-bust in nature every couple of decades due to this dynamic."

And to truly punctuate our status quo bias point:

"The structure global monetary system tends to change every several decades either due to new technology or sovereign defaults (often both), and yet participants tend to assume it will be permanent this time, which is a classic “end of history” perspective."