Thu Jan 20, 2022 – 5:28 pm EST
(LifeSiteNews) – China’s COVID-19 lockdown policies are closing businesses and seaports, which may have a catastrophic effect on the global supply chain.
“Asian production networks, hitherto impressively resilient, may be thrown into a funk as Omicron [the latest variant of COVID-19] grips the region,” wrote HSBC economist and World Economic Forum member Frederic Neumann in a letter to his clients. “The risk, then, is that over the coming months we’ll experience the ‘mother of all supply chain’ stumbles: an Omicron-driven stall in factory Asia.”
China is the world’s largest exporter of goods, and Neumann’s warning comes in tandem with the Chinese government’s decision to close Ningbo, its largest port city by volume, and Tianjin, a port-city near Beijing that has a population of 14 million people. While Neumann maintains that businesses and the shipping industry may be able to sidestep to some degree the logistical hurdles posed by the lockdowns, the end result is that the closures will likely result in shipping delays and increasingly empty shelves for consumers in North America.
“With slower moving variants, many governments were able to shield essential manufacturing operations, limiting the impact on the output of essential goods and components,” Neumann continued. “But that
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