Should Joe Biden worry about soaring lumber prices?

So far, the price hikes are isolated mostly to specific industries. Lumber this month hit an all-time high of $1,686 per thousand board feet, having surged by 406 percent from the $333 per thousand board feet it was trading at the same time a year ago and by 438 percent from its price five years ago. Just as the country is coming out of the woods of the pandemic, it is running out of wood. Prices have tripled, and some builders are having trouble finding any at all. Lowly plywood is so valuable that workers keep it under lock and key after a raft of thefts. In the forests of British Columbia, which supplies much of America's two-by-fours, logger Chace Barber has been feeding the seemingly insatiable demand by driving up to 16 hours to fetch logs he wouldn't have even bothered with when prices were lower.