White House: COVID-19 Pandemic Will End Before Supply Chain Woes

White House economists said in a 42-page report released Thursday (April 14) that the COVID-19 pandemic exposed many of the supply chain snarls that have slowed many sectors of the global economy, but that the outbreak is likely to end long before those issues are resolved.

The report points to shipping backlogs, product shortages and the highest inflation in 40 years as economic issues that preceded the virus outbreak and said they are likely to still present problems when it’s largely contained, according to a report in The New York Times.

“Though modern supply chains have driven down consumer prices for many goods, they can also easily break,” the Council of Economic Advisers wrote in the report. Climate change and the increased number of natural disasters that result will lead to more supply chain interruptions, the report says.

The report is part of the annual Economic Report of the President, which this year is more than 400 pages.

“The U.S. is among and remains one of the strongest economies in the world, but if we look at trends over the last several decades, some of those trends threaten to undermine that standing,” Cecilia Rouse, chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, told NYT in an interview. “The public sector has retreated from its role.”

Relying on production in low-cost countries and adopting a just-in-time approach that limits suppliers’ inventory are two of the reasons that the supply chain is feeling the pinch today, the report says.

Related: Bed Bath & Beyond Slams Into Unforeseen ‘Impediments and Vulnerabilities’

Earlier this week, Bed Bath & Beyond CEO Mark Tritton pointed to “macroeconomic factors, such as the disruption of the global supply chain, the Omicron variant, as well as the geopolitical turbulence weighing on consumer confidence” as reasons for the company’s subpar recent performance.

He said in the company’s second-quarter earnings report that those factors “have uncovered more vulnerabilities than we could have foreseen at this stage of our transformation.”