* consumers were shifting spending from experiences that would've been COVID impacted (holiday travel, entertainment venues, restaurants) to online shopping
* industrial supply chains in Asia were the least impacted by COVID due to the relative lack of explosion in cases there compared to the rest of the world, so we are legitimately shipping more from there and exporting less
* a good chunk of the medical equipment that has been necessitated by COVID (e.g. masks) is made in Asia and that has made demand even more lopsided
* there was a ship backlog because COVID impacted how ships were getting unloaded, and at one point they weren't sending back ships with empty containers to reduce turnaround times, and now there are not enough containers in China and too many in the US.
Wendover Productions video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1JlYZQG3lI
Yes. To quote JP Morgan's recent article "Dude, where's my stuff?"[0]:
> The surge in US import demand has led to a sharp rise in eastbound freight rates (see charts for Shanghai->LA and Shanghai->Rotterdam). However, westbound freight rates have not risen nearly as much, leading to an odd and problematic phenomenon: incentives for container owners to move them back to China empty to accelerate receipt of eastbound freight rates, instead of waiting for containers to be refilled to earn westbound freight rates as well. This further exacerbates supply chain issues, since US goods (i.e., grains) that were supposed to depart US railcars and warehouses for export remain in place, occupying space that US imported goods were destined for.
[0] https://am.jpmorgan.com/us/en/asset-management/institutional...
Sounds absurd, but that's how it is.
In my case it's actually cheaper and much more flexible to build it as you would a traditional building. I live 300 miles from the nearest port, so that doesn't help. I also looked into the container sized temporary buildings used on construction site, and they are made from scratch (not from old shipping containers).
My understanding is that the us doesn't send all that much back to china, and that it was a problem for a while but wasn't the bottleneck until recently.
Anyways, right now the bottleneck isn't shipping containers in China, that was an early pandemic logistics story.
This sort of implies that it’s incredibly cheap to make the container, and/or it’s expensive to add that weight to the ship, and/or our ports are incredibly slow at loading empty containers onto ships.
Edit: e.g. chop them, pack the result into containers, and ship it to Asia to use as raw materials for new containers.
The answer to China being better at 99% of manufacturing isn't subsidies, it's efficiencies.
There are so many insane distortions happening because of supply crunch that subsidies and trade nonsense are actually starting to become irrelevant. (though I really do hope USA sorts their shit out, their China policy is fucking up the world for zero reason).