by ~ » Wed Mar 30, 2011 3:06 am
Rather than spend the evening crushing vicodin, dissolving it to get Hydrocodone, and then mixing it in scotch in order to better enjoy the prospect of plutonium and cesium bioaccumulating in the food supply of one of most progressive, populous, and culturally gifted countries on earth like some fin-de-siecle buzzard, I wonder if some of the crowd here with better economic and business educations could speculate, as it were, on some of the longer term 'fallout' of this earthquake/tsunami/etc from a business/economic perspective?
Even I've noticed the emphasis on horizontal integration in the past few decades, with worldwide JIT supply chains supported by ultra specialists and heavily reliant on sole-supplier arrangements. Now, I read of looming or present shortages of things like aluminum oxide for auto paint (much made in Fukushima Prefecture), a 20% loss of worldwide 300mm silicon wafer production (Miyagi Prefecture), Renesas has not restarted MicroController Unit production due to power outages, etc. "For want of a nail...."
Has the world's manufacturing and supply become so finely tuned and Demmingized that it's become brittle? Are we to the point where we're so interdependent that Arthur Jensen's corporate cosmology finally came to pass (or vice versa)?