It’s only getting much play in the trade/transport niche press. But pretty real product shortages beginning in mid-May or so are already locked in. They’re maybe a thousand miles out in the Pacific Ocean. Modern trade takes place in gargantuan container ships. There are very detailed records …

2/ for every one at sea, when it left China, the US port it’s traveling to etc. I’m doing this from memory so the rough dates may be a few days off. But this last week we were still in a surge of week over week and year over year shipping as shippers and buyers tried to get out ahead of the …

3/ tariffs. So it’s actually higher than usual because of that. But in the first and second week of May it drops off dramatically. I’ve heard the drop off described in different ways. But the most optimistic seems to be a reduction in imports of about 50% or a bit less. Ships to the west coast go…

4/ and to the east coast through the canal. So it hits the west coast first. Then it shows up in Chicago a week or so later as rail and trucking freight drop off. Then on the east coast as ships don’t arrive there. I was talking to one regional banker in the mid Atlantic who told me …

6/ relatively slow. And it has knock on effects in domestic shipping. It will hit trucking hard but that’s still a couple weeks away. Even if you only have roughly a 50% drop off in volume that shows up not just as rising costs but shortages. And even Trump woke up tomorrow and …

7/ called everything off you’d still have a significant period of shortages locked in. And obviously that’s not going to happen. We will also almost certainly see a limited version of the supply chain snarls we say during the pandemic. There are reports of some containers simply sitting or …

8/ being abandoned in ports. Also when there’s no product you start laying off truckers or independents do something else. So when the product comes back on line the system to move the product out of port doesn’t come back immediately. The upshot is that we’ve already locked in a long hot …