The Investment Thread

My mom imports a few things for her business. She had placed an order towards the end of 2020. From the time she placed the order to the time the items were ready to ship the freight price more than doubled. It was so expensive that she was willing to forego her deposit on the items and take the loss over bringing in items that she would have to price higher than she could sell in order to make a profit.

Yesterday two different freight companies called her out of the blue and informed her that they could now ship for the original quote price. This either means the shipping industry is finally getting caught up or a much more likely scenario is the demand has fallen off extremely fast. It could be some combination of both but I'm guessing this is much more demand driven than anything.

Yesterday I walked into a camera shop to pick up a lens that I had repaired. To my surprise, when I walked in they suddenly had the camera in stock I've been trying to buy for the last three months that has been out of stock everywhere.

Just a couple of anecdotal pieces of evidence but enough to make me think we are going to see at least some drop off in business ordering and consumer demand in the next wave of data. The good news, it likely means we are likely going to start see inflation numbers come down pretty quick. It'll be a race between easing inflation and reduced consumer demand that will determine if we enter a recession.