World News

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.