‘Tariff shockwave’ leads to collapse in ocean container bookings

Pretty unrealistically upbeat of you to think our shipping infrastructure will survive this fucking child king

You're acting like this is a pause and things will go back to normal.

I think that's unrealistically optimistic

Just think of all the fat bonuses he can get though once this craziness is done if he still has the job. The backlog will be huuuuuge.

I'm not an American, I'll be fine

naive child

Wait till you see your food bill next month

I'm just a poor smart person. As I understand, and probably all of us should....this is the time to go to the stores and buy up shit. Toilet paper, plastic bags and straws, Christmas toys and everything else that usually says made in China. From what I understand we had around 60 days a few weeks ago for the real shit show to begin. So I would expect stuff to get real interesting soon. That's all. It's a worst possible scenario...shit runs out and all heck breaks lose. I sincerely don't know what to do. Should I just buy a good half a year worth of canned food? Should I do nothing? In don't know. Its a cautious wait and see sort of feeling.

Okay buy if there aren't any boats running around, then that's ecologically good! We're all screwed, but ecologically good.

Efficiency doesn't matter if you're shipping material for production halfway round the world and shipping those products halfway back just because rich people wanted to outsource to cheap labour, and overproduce cheap crap that falls apart way too fast so they can sell us the same cheap crap again a couple years later. It's mostly waste. Some shipping is necessary, but I'd say a vast majority we could do without.

Like I don't believe for a second that these tarrifs will actually fix this problem because they're just a big tantrum with zero strategy involved, but in an ideal world we would make a lot more locally and spend a lot less energy sending things all over the planet to make a handful of shareholders slightly higher margins.

I went looking and found this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_efficiency_in_transport

And yep transport via boat is the most energy efficient.

That said I'm going to assume that OP in this thread is not talking about logistics efficiency, but rather a downturn in a demand for goods.

Isn't shipping via boat one of the most energy efficient forms of goods transport we have as a species?

Spoken like a rich asshole that doesn't have to worry about 300% inflation on food

Honestly he idolizes Russia, so .... Their economy is barely an international one right now. Also one of the worst internationally for a "major" country.

Thankfully infrastructure week is just around the corner!...

Or they'll just argue those failing bridges are okay because aren't used that much

You're thinking of London bridges. 🥁 (I'll see myself out).

The numbers are still non-zero across the northern US. Needing a passport to shop at Walmart should be at least a hint that I'm over 1000 miles away from you. And I should probably be happy that I'm not as representative as you I suppose. In any case, enjoy your "rural" life.

Me, I'mma waiting for iceout on the lake and for the frost danger to go away, (about another 4 weeks), so I can get my garden in again.

Good for you.

The fact that I'm in a district that is among the most rural in the US and I'm still a "wannabe" tells me that there aren't many places left like where you are in the country. Don't act like you have any significant numbers when you describe people who live like you. You're not representative.

Either that or your exaggerating. Which I've noticed people around me doing a lot. Hell, you might not live that far away based on what you described. You talk about where you live like my neighbors do.

Good for you. Where I live, there is still no cell service, (got to be in a town for that), and the US Postal Service will not deliver mail to my home, (I need to pay $165 a year to get a postal box in town to get my mail and I need to drive to get it). I do have internet most of the time, but that and the electricity can be sketchy in a storm, the hazards of living in a forest. So if I can't access that, Oh well, been there before. And I have lived many years without it. Like I said, we will just do without. Oh, and the nearest Walmart is in another country, Canada. I need an enhanced driver's license or passport to shop there. So I ain't missing much there either. The nearest hospital, (level 3, the "barely a hospital" level) is 50 miles away and the nearest ambulance is 20 miles away-- you have a heart attack, you will probably die before help gets there.

There is wannabe rural like you and then there is rural.

The difference is we are used to it. You are not.

Lmao. You even posting here is proof positive that you will in fact, be disrupted.

I live in the most rural congressional district East of the Mississippi. I'm posting from my Wi-Fi that runs off a 5g while I'm laying in bed in my off grid house that's half a mile from the nearest neighbor.

My fridge is full of tofu.

Even Walmart has tofu now.

Quit lying to people about what it's like here.

I think you are underestimating the level of chaos and violence we are headed for. This is going to be much worse than Rome. We will be the barbarians at our own gates.

I don't think that at all. Living in the 4th or 5th century is not at all apologies to the 21st.

People will notice everything being more expensive. Facebook memes will tell them why that is so.

As one of those more rural Americans-- we've always lived that life of not being able to get those things the rest of you take for granted. Whether it's tofu, cell phone service, or healthcare. So my life will continue with little disruption.

They don’t need to be competent to be dangerous.

They are also a bunch of incompetent idiots

One side is a cult that was partially created through a coalition with the gun nuts. The other is a bunch of punks who hate society and are usually impoverished. Which one owns more guns per capita?

How many well organized have decades of experience organizing? Right wing militias are organized and equipped.

Lol no they're not. Trump seized power in a legal coup. They support the constitution and the constitution says Trump is POTUS. Short of a military coup, they will continue to do his bidding and be formed by Goebbels's propaganda.

and the marines are standing ready to uphold the constitution if it gets that bad.

Why wouldn’t the anarchists be well armed too, especially if that’s an obvious necessity for your commune to survive? The only people in the US who refuse to touch a gun, even if their lives depend on it, are the centrist liberals.

Yeah, anyone trying to create an anarchist/communist utopian community will be quickly swallowed up be the Proud Boys who raid them for their food and guzzoline.

Those holding the Power Of Money will keep on using it as long as it has value to make sure *they* are alright (and screw the rest) hence they'll keep on propping-up and buying out whomever controls Force and when those lose that control they'll directly prop-up and buy out the yielders of Force.

Sure, they would've preferred it for the many to pay the full costs of formal yielders of Force whose main jobs is protect the holders of the Power Of Money and their assets from the rest - the way the system still works right now - but they can easilly afford to pay the yielders of Force directly if they have to.

Further, even if Money loses its value and hence its power, they'll fall back to using what's produced by the Assets they own (for example, food produced in fertile land) to pay the yielders of Force: in a total societal collapse (which, frankly, is unlikely) you can bet that the moneyed classes will use whatever power their money has left to either flee to places were society is not collapsing or setting themselves up as the Warlords of the subsequent age.

Anyways, the point anchoring my free thinking about this is that they'll try to keep the very same ownership, dependency and control loops going, just at smaller and smaller sizes (i.e. instead of the society-wide "people have no option that directly or indirectly work for the owners of everything to pay for the place they live in and the food they eat who cost what they cost because just a few own everything" you'll have a smaller sized version of it with a landowner whose land produces food and who uses that food and living areas in that land to pay a couple of armed people to stop the rest from taking the land and the food, so a smaller version of the societal loop we have now were the very people being exploited by money are the ones indirectly giving money the power to exploit them).

Perhaps we will see a more localized anarchist sub-system purely out of necessity.

The problem is that existing power structures will try to transfer their power to the new system, and it isn't that hard for them to do that. A new anarchist communistic structure will have to fight the CIA and the US military's various fragments, if it goes as it did in the Warsaw Pact.

White power movments are literally waiting for this moment. The outliers are the accelerationists but there far far more that have been preparing for generations to exploit the power vacuum.

A local anarchist group is no match for an well armed generation based organization.

It's going to be a Rwandan style civil war. Your MAGA neighbor will kick in your door and shoot you and your wife in the face when told to do so by Fox.

I mean to say, for most Americans who are not news aware, the first signs will be that they simply can't get their treats anymore.

Even then, many of the more rural Americans will only ever have that experience. There's not going to be guns and tanks rolling through Westboro, Wisconsin.

On the plus side, it'll be good circumstances to create new anarchist structures to pick up the pieces.

Don't American bridges fall down already? I guess the wait won't be too long.

I think it's highly optimistic to expect that, if anything it's going to be more like the collapse of the Soviet empire, with weird successor state nonsense, some civil war, guns and violent crime everywhere, and those already in power going on a free for all kill each other and loot everything spree.

My town’s bridge is in need of repair, which was to start this year but is now delayed because federal funding for it was cut. We’ll see…

Favorite treats? Who the fuck can afford treats in this economy...

Yeah, that seems like the boom before the bust. I know even personally I've been buying some things before they become hard to get.

I told friends and relatives in February that we'd be in a recession by the end of the year. I expected 3 quarters for it, not his first 2. 2 consecutive quarters of economic contraction are needed by the modern definition of a recession.

There's still a lot going on globally:


https://www.marinetraffic.com/

But I don't expect the US to have a fun ride

This economist says there’s a 90% chance of a recession. Here’s the math.

During the 2018 trade war with China, the U.S. average tariff rate increased from 2% to 3%. Studies show that the impact on gross domestic product was between 0.25% and 0.7%.

Using the low end of the estimated impact, and Trump’s plan that at the moment calls for double-digit tariff rates, Slok says the negative impact on GDP in 2025 could be almost 4 percentage points — and that doesn’t even include the negative impact from uncertainty for consumer spending decisions and business planning.

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/this-economist-says-theres-a-90-chance-of-a-recession-unless-tariff-policies-are-changed-e43c40d1?mod=home_lead

So a 4% hit to GDP when GDP last year in the US increase by 2.8% does not sound good

A nearly 50% drop in booked global TEUs?

TEU means Twenty Foot Equivalent Units, your basic standard shipping container.

Yes, yes, this is astoundingly, apocalyptically bad.

America will be more fucked than others, but this is Great Depression 2.0.

If this persists, and you end up with a the rest of the year of roughly half the TEU... well you'd go from about 900m TEU to about 550m TEU.

The last time global sea trade clocked in at about 550m TEU was 2010.

https://transportgeography.org/contents/chapter5/intermodal-transportation-containerization/world-container-throughput/

So... yeah, just wipe out the last 15 years worth of volume of world trade, and economic activity/growth enabled by that, and oh also you have about 1 billion more mouths to feed than in 2010.

Or... if you look at it in terms of % change.... its hard to find detailed, historical, week by week figures without paying for the data, but the entirety of the GFC hitting the global economy in 2009 resulted in an 8.5% decrease in global TEU from 2008.

So... it remains to be seen how long and strong the current downturn in TEU will persist...

But, if you say 2025 TEU drops by 30% in aggregate for the rest of this year... that is a 2025 that has a -22.5% 'growth' in total world trade volume, almost 3x as bad as the 07 08 09 GFC, the impact of which was seen in the -8.5% of 2009.

These are spitball guess numbers, I can't predict the future... but I do have a degree in Econ and I used to work as an executive level data analyst for a large mulinational, US based import export firm... so its moderately informed spitball guess.

This is Great Depression 2.0, this will make the GFC look like childs play. This is tens or hundreds of millions of people (globally) going broke, becoming homeless, starving to death levels of bad.

The only way to prevent that at this point is ... well basically step one is America needs to impeach and imprison every Trump administration member... but that is uh... not guaranteed, to say the least.

Yeah, one problem here is that global container circulation needs to, well, circulate. People don't ship empty containers, that's stupid expensive. So container hire is going to get way more expensive as global shipping needs to rebalance. Happened under covid, too.

I work in international freight and my department focuses on the U.S. - Canadian border. We've been bracing for a decline but so far our volume has been steadily increasing.

I see the documents for every shipment crossing my assigned gateway and it looks like consumer goods are staying at the same volume, but B2B is increasing. So while Canadian consumers are boycotting American goods, industry is reliant on American parts to continue functioning.

I'm assuming the increased volume is a result of companies buying things that they know they will need in the future before the trade war intensifies and those same parts cost them even more.

Goddang that gif makes me laugh

But what if, now hear me out, we tow the entire thing OUTSIDE the environment?

Hurray for Trump's idiocy!


Seriously though. I'll sacrifice this capitalistic nonsense to save a habitable environment.

Yeah, I live in Korea and usually this time of year the air quality is absolutely shit. However, due to the trade war, some factories in eastern China have closed and this apparently led to the great aqi forecast the past week or so.

Shrinkflation is when somebody sells you less of a product for the same price.

What you mean is stagflation. That when you have high inflation and a shrinking economy.

At any rate this is really great news for the environment.

I want to agree, but this does not bode well for food trade. Less shipping overall means less economy of scale, which hurts everyones access to food.

Kind of like when COVID cleared up the air for weeks. Of course that was also awful for the economy, but it's almost like our normal way of overconsumption is killing the environment...

This is exactly what I was about to say.

I was gonna say - is Trump accidentally helping the environment??

I read something that some people experienced the collapse of the Roman Empire as their local bridge going out and no one ever coming to fix it.

I think a lot of Americans are going to experience the collapse of the American empire as their favorite treats never getting to the store shelves.

Trump definitely did not intent to do that - but this is a good thing for the environment.

If we end up in a global shrinkflation, this might berge worst way to reduce our carbon footprint, but it will probably be the long term consequence.

I once met a guy who was in sales for a shipping container company. He said it was the easiest, most lucrative sales job in the world. There really wasn't any sales at all, he just processed the orders that flowed in all day long. He got a fat commission on each one, and earned several commissions every single day. He was making BANK. He said it was nearly impossible to get a job doing that, it would require somebody to die to get their position.

I guess he's going to have a bad year, for a change.

Is it me, or does this look absolutely scary for world trade as a whole?

Note, that data is from April 8th, which is before the 90 day tariff pause was announced.

From what my friends working in retail have told me, the trend is (temporarily) reversed. Every freight container going to the US is getting booked solid at inflated rates as brands try to bring in merchandise from non-Chinese factories into the US in case the tariffs resume.

This could be the best thing the current administration did for the planet. No more shipping boats. It's going to be really interesting in the next two months.

Link to the image is still up, so we have to remove this as an image post.

If you replace the image with the link to the article, we can restore it.

Now China won't be able to destroy the US with their uh... affordable consumer goods! That'll show 'em!

Oh look, trump did something good! accidentally good, I'm sure he didn't intended that, but still

Is Trump working on Making America Great Again, by turning it into a European colony again? A massive trade war with China, is obviously going to hurt both countries and Europe is the largest economy left.

Wait is Trump actually doing something good for the environment even if by mistake??!?

The main reason he is doing this is only because his Hero did it.

And trump really likes doing ANYTHING Hitler did.

As of Aprill 8.

I guess MAGA people will see this as a win? Since imports are down 2x much as imports. If the value of the goods in these containers are roughly equal, that should mean smaller trade deficits?

oh no the economy is collapsing. But at least we have racism!