What in the ever loving heck is going on with goods production these days? Why has production response to increased demand for things become so sclerotic? Is it still supply chain issues? How are we on month 10 of a shortage of ADHD meds, which are mostly cheap and generic, and now this?
Because companies have figured out that if they fuck around with production they can jack prices up. In the Before Times, somebody here posted an article about how commodities traders were artificially inflating prices for aluminum ingots. What they were doing was they had a pair of shell companies with warehouses next to one another. Company A would get a shipment of ingots, and then promptly "sell" those ingots to Company B (moving the ingots from one warehouse to another). When a customer wanted to buy some ingots from Company B, they would say, "Oh, sorry, we just sold our inventory to Company A, so you'll have to buy it from them." They'd then move the stuff back to Company A's warehouse, and it'd be sold at an artificially inflated price. And yeah, whoever owned those shell companies had enough money that they could scoop up a large enough share of the ingots on the market that they could get away with this. This late-stage capitalism shit is getting real fucking old. Most of the money that circulates on Wall Street goes to bullshit money-making scams that don't actually add anything to the global economy but still enables assgaskets to inflate their net worth to obscene levels. Fucking Adam Smith never conceived of a day when people could amass obscene fortunes simply by passing the same bits of money back and forth between one another without it having an impact on the wider population in a positive way.
Yeah, that has to do with our slapfight with China. Most of those substances went to being produced over in china because I think the designer drug market wanted to take those meds out of US production to avoid pollution issues, and to put customs and border patrol into the mix to keep local manufacture low. A lot of those substances are semi controlled and good for tripping on. If you make them over there, you have a record of where they are going over here, and you do not have ready manufacturing capabilities over here to worry about cutting into local pharma sales. Oh look, my friend happened to get a couple of kilos of DXM (I use that for an example) out of a manufacturing run. All of a sudden people are niot buying all that cough syrup because pure is so much better. It is so easy to skim off production runs that the workers were doing it all the time over in xinjang. It sued to be over here, but not any more. Now customs makes sure you cannot buy a manufactured chemical locally and then package and sell it. Whatever the chemical you are looking for is, it was all made in China, and now in India. They control the production so lack of production means an increase in price worldwide, especially in the US where it would be easy to put the manufacturing back.
