What would happen if the country where most of America’s manufacturing base was outsourced back in the days of Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton were to shut off the industrial power supply? The world is about to find out.
China, reports indicate, has slashed the electricity supply to 16 of its 31 provincial jurisdictions in recent days. Many of these jurisdictions are factory-heavy, meaning everything that has a “Made in China” label slapped on it is now at risk of seeing shortages.
Beijing has suddenly decided that the energy it has been using for decades to power all of the world’s outsourced manufacturing is “unclean” and must be limited. This has created waves of rolling blackouts that are interfering with production at a time when the supply chain is already suffering due to Wuhan coronavirus (Covid-19) restrictions.
A chief economist told the state-run South China Morning Post (SCMP) that the situation “worsened” this past weekend, leaving factories ill-equipped to continue churning out everything from iPhones to iguana lamps.
The longer this goes on, the barer retail shelves will become. This is especially true now that shipping containers are having to float around out in the ocean with nowhere to port due to workers shortages and other economic symptoms of Chinese Virus fascism.
Is anyone really buying that China is suddenly worried about the environment?
The excuses the Chinese regime is giving as to why it has to cut off the power to the manufacturing industry — right now — are laughable. The latest one suggests that China is suddenly concerned about the environment and thus has to cap the use of coal.
There has never been a time in the current generation that China has ever cared about pollution. In fact, China practically wore its heavily polluting ways as some kind of badge of honor.
Now, as the Fauci Flu continues to decimate global supply chains, we are expected to believe that China has suddenly become a tree-hugging nation at a time when one wrong move could result in a total economic collapse?
It is just too convenient that China would pull a stunt like this now, when the world’s superpowers are on the verge of defaulting. Was this planned long in advance to initiate the ‘great reset?’”
“With market attention now laser-focused on Evergrande and on Beijing’s unprecedented curbs on the property sector, another major supply-side shock may have been underestimated or even missed,” one market analyst told the SCMP.
Factory operators are already warning the world that these rolling blackouts threaten to stop production indefinitely. They may have just enough energy to keep the furnace warm, one said, but there may not be enough for much else beyond that.
How long this takes to trickle down and become noticeable at your local Walmart remains to be seen. The automobile industry is already taking a major hit as it relies on microchips from China to produce modern vehicles – what else is next?
Peng Wensheng, the chief economist at investment bank China International Capital Corporation, issued a note suggesting that this decline in production could drag down China’s national economic growth rate by 0.1 to 0.15 percentage points both in this quarter and the next.
“The problems involving the ‘abnormal growth’ of exports and high [producer price index] must be solved by means of power rationings, [but this] will sacrifice economic growth to a certain extent,” added economists Deng Haiqing and Wang Shuqin about how policymakers in China are supposedly working on figuring out the “least-bad option at the moment.”
Sources for this article include: