One of my friends is a farmer. He tells me fertilizer prices are double what they were last year.
How much is real vs. contrived or fake shortage? There are many who think they can make a short term profit killing on commodities before they have to drop back to more realistic pricing. Oil producers had a problem through out the years from 2016 to 2021 in that there was a glut of oil not being sold with stagnantly low oil prices. Remember the stories of ships and barges in the Gulf of mexico and off our other ports filled with oil that was not being released? The producers and the middlemen can now take an upfront profit increase on selling that oil to make their money on the front end until demand drops and they have to back off on their prices again. If the demand drops too low,the prices will drop and they will just refrain from releasing excess oil onto the markets again. There is plenty of oil but greed and the need to maintain a sort of “acceptable” profit margin per barrel is the priority of the producers and the middlemen as well as the refiners.