How the World Ran Out of Everything Inside the Global Supply Chain

Guest tonight is a global economics correspondent for The New York Times and author of the new book, How the World Ran Out of Everything, Inside the Global Supply Chain. Please welcome Peter Goodman.

How the world ran out of everything. During COVID, we ran out of toilet paper.

I'm sorry to say the vulnerabilities are still there.

I think what you painted the picture so well in here was that it's American business executives right that are saying we can make more money.

Look how the world ran out of everything is available now.

How the world ran out of everything during covid. We ran out of toilet paper. Sure did. Baby formula, computer chips. We had cars that were ready to run, but no computer chips. What happened?

Why don't we just make this shit here?

We could make more things here and there's a movement to make more things here. And that's helpful. It's in the margins. But we're not going back to self-sufficiency.

These are decisions, you know, the hollowing out of our factory towns that are not made in Beijing. These are decisions made in boardrooms in New York and Seattle and Congress.

Look how the world ran out of everything is available now. Peter Goodman, everybody.

It's an excellent book. I really recommend it.

It's about how the supply chain went completely haywire during COVID, getting down to the granular specifics of trucking and ports and shipping and all of that.

I just gave my little synopsis, but why don't you talk about why you wanted to write this book? Because you were covering all of these major backups, snafus, shortages, et cetera, as they were unfolding.

It's true that time and again, I mean, this, this to me is sort of reminiscent of how, you know, the subprime mortgage crisis gets blamed or really the derivatives crisis that then trashes the financial system, that trashes the regular economy that all of us depend on. That gets blamed on poor people, you know, who were greedy about buying houses instead of the Wall Street players who gorged on synthetic derivatives.

I just want to say to people, it is a wonky subject. It's a very readable book. You take us through a small businessman in what was it, Mississippi? Mississippi, yeah. He's trying to get his product manufactured in time for Christmas. And you use that as a story to go through each of these pieces of the supply chain, which completely collapsed during COVID and help us make sense, retrospectively, of some of the things we were experiencing in our own lives and draw some lessons from the future.