Welcome to The Inquiry, I'm Sharma Incosia, each week one question four expert witnesses

and an answer.

Dozens of ships wait outside two of America's biggest and busiest ports, Long Beach and Los

Angeles in Southern California.

Each vessel is stacked with thousands of huge multi-coloured rectangular shipping containers,

inside them are millions of basic and luxury items, including toys, electrical goods,

clothes, furniture and food.

Many have been queuing to unload their goods for weeks.

Meanwhile on land, shells are empty in shops, but this isn't only happening in the US.

People around the world are struggling to get hold of products.

Online orders are taking ages to arrive.

Several companies and trade associations of warning customers that stock issues will

take months or even years to resolve.

So this week we're asking, why are we seeing global shortages?

Part one, chips with everything.

We are sure to see PCs have shortages, graphics cards, don't try to buy a graphics card,

we know it's almost impossible.

There's been supply constraints and smartphones, it's all over the map, it's pretty much virtually

every end market and every geography is being impacted to some degree.

So they're absolutely like critical shortages.

Stacy Raskin is managing director and senior analyst at Bernstein Research covering the

US semiconductor sector, and he's been watching an interesting trend.

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