>digest anything related to cost increases other than "it's probably oil" I think Oil is a large part for sure, probably larger than the others, but I have no

>digest anything related to cost increases other than "it's probably oil" I think Oil is a large part for sure, probably larger than the others, but I have no way of diving into how each affects prices. Energy costs have grown the most dramatically of the factors I listed, so "it's probably oil" doesn't seem too far off at the moment. However in the near term, looking at China's labor force (https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.TOTL.IN?locations=CN https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.TOTL.IN?location...) you can see that it's begun its downward trend (https://www.populationpyramid.net/china/2020/ https://www.populationpyramid.net/china/2020/), which means that labor costs in China necessarily have to rise as supply falls, which will affect prices very soon (if not already). This labor crunch will slowly squeeze in many places and make international goods more of a hassle to produce. It also has a destabilizing effect on the QoL in many countries (see Russia) which will provoke them to drastic moves that make global shipping even more of a pain (more expensive). Right now we still import lots from China, maybe someone else can find something better than this chart of nominal trade values with China per month: https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/balance/c5700.html https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/balance/c5700.html but I don't know if the dollar amount reflects the total volume accurately. I would wager we import less goods overall compared to 2019. As for why I think demand is the same, take a look at the number of workers in the USA: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PAYEMS https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PAYEMS. It's about where it was in 2019 and we managed to provide every service we needed just fine back then - goods have to be more expensive due to some sort of gap in supply, not due to a new outsized growth in demand (in my opinion at least). Open to other ideas and opinions