Mills are making a retarded amount of money. Log prices are pretty high right now but they haven't been tracking the insane LPI. There's a lot of mills out there so the situation doesn't seem too bad, but once you factor in the logistics of actually getting logs out of the woods, there's really just a bunch of local near-monopolies which are long-term products of the loss of so much of the logging/milling infrastructure from 2008-12 and earlier as a result of the kiked ESA and NEPA process. The SBA rules funneling relatively cheap volume into "small business mills" aren't helping anything either.
So it sounds like it's more "we can charge you more because we can charge you more" than any kind of demand outstripping supply?
They're definitely pushing the limits with how much they're charging for a unit of lumber and not doing much to increase supply by not passing a relative portion of that price on through to the timber producers / loggers / truckers / etc.
"Capitalism"
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