White House press secretary Jen Psaki.
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- WH press secretary Jen Psaki praised the administration’s efforts to reduce supply chain bottlenecks.
- “Good news, we’ve saved Christmas,” Psaki said.
- “Packages are moving, gifts are being delivered and shelves are not empty,” Biden said.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki on Wednesday celebrated the Biden administration’s efforts to alleviate supply chain bottlenecks to ensure that Christmas gifts arrived on time for the holiday.
“Good news, we’ve saved Christmas,” she told reporters during a press briefing. “And that is because President Biden recognized this challenge early, acted as an honest broker to bring key stakeholders together, and focused on addressing practical problems across the global supply chain.”
The global supply-chain tangle has been among the biggest snags in the US economic recovery over the past year. Port bottlenecks and shipping delays kept businesses from being able to restock goods as reopening fueled a spending boom. The crisis first showed up in inflation data as the gap between limited supply and rising demand sent prices soaring. As the country entered the holiday season, concerns that the mess would delay gift shipments intensified.
That problem is being solved, Psaki said. Procrastinators won’t get to pin the blame on the supply chain, after all.
Biden met earlier Wednesday with business and industry leaders and spoke about his administration’s work to address global supply chain problems that threatened to delay shipments and empty store shelves ahead of the holiday season.
“We brought together business and labor leaders to solve problems and the much-predicted crisis didn’t occur. Packages are moving, gifts are being delivered and shelves are not empty,” Biden said.
The Biden administration took several steps to tackle supply chain backlogs over the past few months, including a plan to have major California ports open 24 hours a day and to have delivery companies such as Walmart, FedEx, and UPS increase their operations.
“The number of containers sitting on the docks at the Ports of LA and Long Beach for over eight days have fallen by nearly 50%. The average amount of time containers sit on docks has fallen by a week. The price of shipping a container between Asia and the West Coast has fallen by more than 25% since its peak in September,” Psaki said.
“People can go purchase presents even at this point if they haven’t done their shopping,” she encouraged.
Psaki also highlighted a New York Times report published Wednesday that described how fears about the supply chain were wrong as most Christmas gifts have arrived without delay, partly because Americans ordered in advance and shopped in person.
“Take that Scrooge, the Grinch and all of the doubters that this could happen. Also shelves are stocked at 90% (pre-pandemic levels are 91%),” Psaki tweeted, along with a link to the NYT story.
To be sure, the crisis is far from averted. Roughly 100 container ships are still waiting to be unloaded off the California coast. Processing those shipments will take some time, as logjams exist throughout the logistics sector, ranging from truck chassis to warehouse workers.
Shortages of key materials can also extend bottlenecks for certain goods. Semiconductors, for example, remain in short supply, a trend that could delay shipments of new cars, appliances, and electronic devices. The Omicron variant also threatens to hinder chip production in East Asia, Goldman Sachs analysts said in a recent note. That could widen the supply-demand gap even further for many red-hot markets.
Work in healing the global supply chain isn’t close to over. But for the Christmas weekend, Americans can rest easy knowing their gifts will likely arrive on time — and that they can go shop for some if they still need to.
Read the original article on Business Insider 
