As the price of lumber raced up to over $1,500 per thousand board feet in the spring of 2021, economists acknowledged that the supply side of the economy simply couldn’t sustain the housing demand rush unleashed by the pandemic. Of course, we’d later learn that this inflationary phenomena stretched far beyond housing, and that lumber was actually the canary in the coal mine for inflation at large. That predictive power is why economists and analysts alike are once again paying close attention to lumber: After nosediving to $383 per thousand board feet by the end of ...