The message in this article is that Trump’s pressure on India not to buy Russian oil may work in part. But it’s an example of how industries will always find a way around trade barriers. It won’t actually reduce the quantity of Russian oil flowing, though it might depress the prices a bit. And if some country decides to be antagonistic to the US, they could make the practice counterproductive.
Trade controls always have consequences you didn’t foresee.
This extremely interesting article details what’s happening at the Panama Canal in terms of ocean shipping trade. I learned a lot from it.
For instance, containers are a small part of the trade through the Canals, both the Panamax and NeoPanamax (deepwater, for the larger ships) routes. The largest part is bulk, grains, coal and oil and LNG.
And the majority of the trade in 2020 is Pacific to Atlantic, not Atlantic to Pacific.
Since there’s a lot of export of these commodities, particularly agricultural and oil-based, from the Gulf Coast of the US to Asia, Canal traffic is a good measure of US international trade of these.
Altogether a good read.
Greg Miller, Senior Editor Thursday, October 15, 2020
Transpacific trade won’t recover for at least a couple of years, says an article in the Loadstar.
Most of the tariffs remain in place. And much trade has shifted from China to other Southeast Asia countries, like Vietnam, rather than returning to China. US container imports from China are off by more than 8% compared with last year. Vietnam was up 33%, to 1.4m teu; Thailand was up 18%, to 570k teu, and Malaysia was up 27%, to 335k teu. But total trade from the region is down.
And US consumers have already overpaid by $38 billion for goods from February of 2018 to September of 2019. That is the typical story in trade wars; the consumer pays for the war through increased prices for purchases. It’s a premise of trade economics; when trade is restricted, the consumer must buy at higher prices because they can’t get them from the lower-cost location.
And it’s not clear at all that the trade deal between the US and China will change that trend away from China, and down in general. Of course, we don’t know what is really in the deal yet, or which things will actually happen. And we know there’s been little advance on the intellectual property front, and the US has ceded the opportunity to gain support for dumping claims through the WTO.
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Supply Chain and Logistics 