As an economist, Chris Kuehl, founder and partner of Armada Corporate Intelligence, likes to turn to American satirist H.L. Mencken to keep himself humble.

“I like his quote that says for every complex problem, there’s an answer that is clear, simple and wrong,” he joked to an audience of over 400 ag communicators at the 2024 Ag Media Summit, held this week in Kansas City, Mo.

Part of the struggle is dealing with how quickly things can change, Kuehl said. He cited last week’s selloff on Wall St., the current wild swings in crude oil prices and a newfound reluctance from AI investors as three recent examples.

Economists are wrong more often that Kuehl would sometimes like to admit, but that’s almost by design sometimes, he added.

“It's important to recognize that economists are fundamentally philosophers,” he said. “We can look at the same data in terms of diametrically opposed, because some of us are conservative and some of us are liberal, and we have different opinions as to who is supposed to win and who’s supposed to lose.”

Beware of drama in the media, Kuehl also warned.

“Economics can be fundamentally boring,” he said. “And whenever you get a story and you’re in the world of the media, it’s hard sometimes to get people to pay attention to what you’re writing. And it gets really tempting to kind of overdramatize things.”

Kuehl has also been monitoring two major issues that could reignite supply chain troubles again – one more affecting overseas markets, and the other hitting much closer to home.

The first is the geopolitical turmoil still raging in Israel and Palestine. That “Red Sea mess” hasn’t directly affected the U.S., but it does have a major impact on cargo that used to move through the Red Sea to the Mediterranean, which now has to go all the way around the coast of Africa.

“They can’t get insurance to go through the Red Sea – there’s no way to protect the ships,” Kuehl said. “So they now have to lengthen their voyages by two or three days. That has created a shortage of container ships and containers, which has driven the price of shipping up dramatically.”

Transportation woes in the U.S. have taken on a completely different shape, meantime. A surge of 60,000 truckers emerged during the early stages of the pandemic, but many of those people later moved on to other jobs (manufacturing, construction, etc.). Now, there’s a deficit of truckers again.

“If there's a crisis that is really present right now, it's trucking in agriculture, because that's not a real high paying sector, anyway,” Kuehl said. “One of the challenges for anybody who’s driving a truck is that you want loads going both ways. But when you’re hauling agricultural goods, there isn’t that load coming back. You’re just hauling it to one place, and then you drive home empty, and that’s not a good thing.”

Another factor that makes economics difficult to properly parse is the “bizarre combination of mandates” that guides policies from the Federal Reserve, Kuehl said. The Fed is mandated to control inflation, which it does by raising interest rates. It is also mandated to increase employment, which it does by lowering interest rates.

“Go left and go right,” he said. “You can’t, you know, because it’s one or the other. You have to pick what you’re most concerned with.”

Given the runup in interest rates over the past couple of years, Kuehl concluded that the Fed is still predominantly interested in tamping down inflation, which has come down considerably from where it was at its peak in June 2022, when it moved as high as 9.1%.