With holiday shopping upon us, the supply chain has been experiencing even more difficulties. But, Betsey Stevenson, professor of public policy and economics, say that the issues should be worked out soon.
"It's definitely getting a lot better. But, it is some turbulent times, there were a lot of companies that made a bunch of stuff that they were expecting us to buy in 2020. And then, we didn't end up buying it, right? So, prices felt crazy," Stevenson told MSNBC. "And we saw prices coming down because people couldn`t sell their stuff. Now, there's a game where sellers are having to figure out where we as consumers are going to be. And they have to meet that demand before we actually show them what it is."
One solution to the supply chain problem is adding more jobs to the sector, which has been working. But other sectors aren't as lucky.
"We did see 60,000 jobs added in the goods-producing sector. To put that in perspective, before the pandemic started, we still hadn't made up all the jobs lost in the goods-producing sector from the 2008 recession," Stevenson told Yahoo! Finance. "That's usually really slow to recover, that's not what's happened. What's been slow to recover is the service sector, which got completely hammered by COVID."
"One of the things we're seeing is that people are out there buying goods at a very, very high right now. Goods as opposed to services. We have been cooped up from the pandemic for so long. And we're just we want new cars. We want to be couches. We want new stuff. We're still a little hesitant to go to restaurants and go to shows and do things in person with other people. So the inflation is coming from that real surge in demand to buy stuff at the same time that countries around the world are having a hard time sending us stuff," she told Bloomberg Markets.
View the news items featuring Stevenson below:
- What'd You Miss?, Bloomberg Markets, November 30, 2021
- All In with Chris Hayes, MSNBC, December 1, 2021
- Labor market: ’We are not seeing the recovery in the service sector broadly,’ expert explains, Yahoo! Finance, December 3, 2021
