Container shipping has cratered, as ship owners try to avoid unprofitable trips
wsj.com
wsj.com
Hard to really feel like this is a crisis, since all of the reporting is how there was a brief, glorious period (for the companies) of 10x prices, and the crisis is that the period is ended.
If the Association of Umbrella Manufacturers says it's raining outside and the Organization of Sunscreen Bottlers says it's sunny, the reporter needs to open the window and look rather than just forwarding those statements; I can read them myself if I want to.
By the way, I know an independent journalist: the version you get on TV is often the editor's cut. Sometimes journalists are only reporters, but more often than not there is censorship (or self-censorship for non independent journalists) in the editor's room. That's why report from the same journalist can be used by 'liberal news' and ' conservative news' (not idea if that happens in the US, but in my country it does.)
Honestly, you'll be better served with local newspapers. Or independent local news.
Journalists talking about the future. That’s not journalism.
It’s a journalism of building up expectations and hyping up the dopamine, ie it’s barely marketing. Journalism is about reporting information. Information about future events is not information.
We'll see how it goes.
It wasn’t that news got bad or people got more evil, it’s that the value of information cratered and now it’s not even expensive enough to come with editors.
Which one are you talking about?
There is plenty of news that affect me, it just happens to (mostly) not be covered in the news. And when it is it is often propaganda rather than even remotely unbiased reporting.
It gives ratings on headlines and it helps to get an overview of the news.
Someone please tell 'em about alt tags.
If people actually paid for them they might have a chance to hire competent people and do investigative journalism.
But now they're being paid mostly by ad revenue and a handful of subscribers. So they have to publish trash to optimize for clicks.
>And its not even the government's money (from taxes) but my money
If you're a tax payer the government's money is your money, no?
In my case here is Germany, yes.
> If you're a tax payer the government's money is your money, no?
Indirectly, yes but the details are very different.
With taxes the government decides on how much tax you pay for various things and then the money goes into the general budget from which the government again allocates funds for various things. Allocating more money towards overpaid entertainment personalities and greedy sports organizations in this model would mean less money the government has to pay for other things so you'd hope they would put some thought in what expenditures are really needed. The budget is also periodically re-evaluated. Taxes are also generally either based on something you choose to do or based on income, meaning they are means tested and usually increase progressively in order to put less of a burden on those that already have less. Taxes are also collected by government institutions which means whatever organizatons are involved in providing the services the taxes pay for won't need to know my banking details or place of residence.
The TV fees are very different. Here the legacy media companies get a flat sum from everyone (with some exceptions) without consideration for either what burden this places on the individual payer or what funds are really needed to provide the respective services. Politicians only ever have to think about the amount when the companies involved ask for bigger handouts. Instead of considering of these legacy media companies are still needed with the internet and available, or if we need the current excess (with a separate TV station per state plus two for the country overall), these media companies and the politicans that enable them have decided that making their services available online means that everyone is a potential user and must pay. Unlike taxes these fees are not collected by the finace ministry but by a separate organization representing the media companies which automatically receives the place of residence for everyone registered in Germany.
There are taxpayer-supported, nonprofit news sources. They are not any better, spewing the same type of opinionated stuff (propaganda, really).
The need to make money is not the culprit there.
I'd pay for a good, reliable news source, but I can't find one at all, and I don't pay.
I laugh (read: cry) everytime I hear a wannabe "journalist" lament the "threats to Democracy", not realizing - or at least not acknowledging - that they and their ilk have been leading that effort, shamelessly, for years.
If there's any group that knows first hand about what "the threat to Democracy" looks like, it's contemporary "journalism".
Spoken on a popular site that routinely uses pirate mirrors to circumvent news site paywalls. :)
News should be free in a way.
But piracy of paywalled content just provides a relief valve for whatever demand there is for accessibility, and keeps the 'news' a property of parties like Rupert Murdoch (in the case of WSJ).
There's an old quote addressing exactly that:
"When you’re young, you look at television and think, There’s a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that’s not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That’s a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It’s the truth."
"Seek"? Probably yes.
Personally i am not willing to consume anything that is even remotely forced upon to me. I will not watch the news when companies think i should watch it. I will watch it whenever and however i want.
I will not be forced into some weird guilt trip that news companies cannot publish acceptable trustworthy news because of my lack of interest and spending on it.
But hey, if for another big part of the population that business model works, good for them. I don't care.
Fast-forward. All new Vice productions are deeply and uniformly opinionated. Comparatively few people care to watch. Relative to their previous work, this later work received no significant attention and generated no revenue.
There is political groupthink in reporting ruinous to the bottom line.
One of the founders founded the proud boys.
>They went to interesting, dangerous places and reported what they saw by showing you what they saw.
They were rich nepo kids going into places and doing a ton of poverty porn. Seeing the inside of a favela on the eyes of a brooklyn kids whose dad makes pharma patents was edgy in 2000s but boy does it not hold up.
> All new Vice productions are deeply and uniformly opinionated.
Same as ever, nepo babies think they know everything. If you go back you see plenty of it in their early stuff too. You were just younger and noticed it less.
> this later work received no significant attention and generated no revenue.
By 2012 they had already completely sold out when they sold the mag to i-D and still where making massive numbers.
They are being sold now for 225 million despite their bankruptcy.
> There is political groupthink in reporting ruinous to the bottom line.
Fox News is the most overt political entertainment network in the planet and also the most profitable. Seems like your theory is entirely at odds with reality and your rose tinted glasses of gonzo Vice is mostly ignoring the actual content of the magazine.
That's ad hominem, not a counter argument about Vice's content.
> They were rich nepo kids going into places and doing a ton of poverty porn. Seeing the inside of a favela on the eyes of a brooklyn kids whose dad makes pharma patents was edgy in 2000s but boy does it not hold up.
Yes, so? This description is good journalism. You're just trying to come up with derogatory terms to describe it, while there's nothing wrong with any of that.
1. Saying a person founded a group is not an attack, insulting them is.
2. The relationship between a vaccine stance and an environmental stance is weak, if existent at all. The relationship of a political advocacy group and a media outlet is pretty strong - that is "i have something to say and the tools to say it loudly and widely" is a common pattern among those with the means (religions, wealthy folks, political fringe groups, etc). It's not ad-hominem to say "this new MLM Bernie Madoff is promoting is very similar to the ponzi scheme he was previously convicted of" either.
3. It's not ad-hominem to declare that a persons actions are consistent with their stated goals - it's not an attack, nor is it an attempt at discrediting (or supporting) their position. It is ad-hominem to say "unrelated opinions about vaccines discredit this environmental opinion".
Pointing out overt political activism by the founders is pretty important context when discussing the "apolitical" nature of their ventures.
> Yes, so?
Edgy != good. The journalistic value of interviewing a "cartel" member with 0 verifcation, sources or journalistic codes is not good journalism. It is just titilating porn for middle class people. The person being interviewed might just be a kid with a mask, an airsoft gun talking about how much heroin he sells and how many people he tortures.
Or worse, they might actually be in a cartel and try to impress the kid with the camera and shoot someone to shock them. (Something close to this happened while they filmed cartel members doing coke at a bar in mexico). Absolutely no journalism happened that night.
> while there's nothing wrong with any of that.
Shitting all over the word journalism, ignoring lessons learned by countless of better, braver, more talented men and women and going for shock over reality is all pretty good reasons.
I only used buzzwords because I think the naivete of rich kids pretending to be journalists being exploited for profit by a company founded by a wannabe neonazi is too obvious to have to spell out.
Yes, interviewing a faceless "cartel" member with zero verification would be poor journalism, which isn't the same as bringing a camera into XYZ location and recording/describing the conditions, which classifies as journalism in the same way that war journalists who go into warzones and describe situations are journalists.
I think ironically enough your personal feelings regarding the founders of Vice are coloring your perspective on their earlier work which meets the textbook definition of journalism.
A similar thing happened to the Tea Party which was anti-1%'res which is now controlled by their corporate donors. It's new name is the House Freedom Caucus and they want to default on US debt.
The main thing I remember about it (which may still be true today) is it was the only daily TV source of relatively unbiased reporting that includes world issues and isn't 100% focused on reporting within the USA.
If you don’t talk about politics then your position is “I am fine with the way things are now”, which is political.
I can say that Biden isn't up to the job, and that Trump is a wanna-be dictator who should not be given a second chance at pulling it off. That's apolitical, in that I'm not shilling for either side, but I'm sure not fine with the way things are now. I'm just also not fine with the other side's proposed solution.
That's not a political statement (unless you have a very expansive definition of "political"[1]), but it's still not "I am fine with the way things are now".
[1] And if literally everything is political... then nothing is.
The problem is reverse, we thought they were giving the network what it wanted but it's clear now it's a narrative to push a world view that may or may not reflect reality.
We started with trust and moved to conspiracy:)
I've seen this in writing from journalists and writers, and feel like this is too easy of an out. It's as if readers were in a vacuum and journalism didn't affect them in any way shape or form. I don't buy that the press and media had no hand in creating the current public's lowered expectations.
So perhaps it's what people are willing to consume now, but it's after decades and decades of market shaping and journalistic exposure. We can't just ignore that.
I say that because it's not like the pattern is unique to journalism.
1. "the ownership of the media";
2. "advertising as the primary source of the income of media companies";
3. "the sources of the information and opinions that are propagated by mass media, which are primarily government officials, business interests, and the experts who are approved of and often funded by government and business";
4. "the negative feedback that mass media companies get when their content conflicts with these common interests";
5. fear, i.e., "mass media have an interest in selecting and conveying information, and in molding what counts as a respectable range of opinion, in a manner that is conducive to generating fear and hostility toward anyone who would challenge the shared basic ideological presuppositions of the overall government-corporate-media complex".
In other words, the media is a propaganda machine that reflects and reinforces the narrative of the regime. It involves no conspiracy, only dependence and coincidence of interest. As Chomsky would say, the media is to democracy what the police baton is to more overtly aggressive regimes.
[0] https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2022/03/chomskys-propaganda...
1. Appealing to vast audiences and then selling them to someone else for a very low price per view or a subscription. (Populist)
2. Appealing to a small group that contributes handsomely to your cause. (Funded Propaganda/Self Funded)
Even publicly funded media has to do something along those lines and appeal to the people who fund their organization. When consuming journalism, you always have to look at who is paying for that journalism. That will determine what they DO NOT report on. This is why it's so important to view information from competing organizations.
Few are willing to admit they've been duped so they double down on embracing the con. It's a vicious cycle.
It is, but maybe not in its traditional forms. Further, social media was supposed to be part of the solution but apart from a few shining examples has instead become about selling us crap, spying on us, and holding our attention away from the problems of the world. This all isn't to say that media in some other form or rebirth of these old forms isn't still the answer to information sharing and reengaging civic dialog.
Without the reporters at the WSJ, your doctors could be making decisions on your care on the basis of Theranos blood tests.
https://demodexio.substack.com/p/the-dangers-of-an-illiberal...
When news was just news there were “slow news days” where there was either no reporting or “fluff”.
We all speak English here and read the same article right? Shipping fees are back to prepandemic levels but operating costs are much higher.
Why doesn't that count as a crisis or as something worth reporting?
Wages go up: crisis that could destroy our economy.
Company profits go up - economic growth
Wages go up - inflation
A glut nearly always follows a shortage. Virtually every single time. So there is no contradiction at all in noting there was a severe shortage before but now there’s a glut.
its exactly at the historical 30 year average. nothing to see here lol
https://www.balticexchange.com/en/data-services/market-infor... ostensibly has some information on the index, but it's hard to tell.
If it's not inflation adjusted, then being on the 30 year nominal average is actually a substantial decline in real costs over time.
https://www.xeneta.com/blog/weekly-container-rate-update-wee...
Or here:
https://www.xeneta.com/blog/weeek-20-manzanillos-star-on-the...
Still, carriers are feeling the price drops for sure. But it is way less dramatic then it was during 2008 onwards. Those rates back then were close to unsustainable for carriers. They nice for the shippers so, but the days of up to two weeks without container retention fees are gone for good.
BORING
So you just reduce your time scale and talk about the massive drop.
I’m shocked they didn’t have a headline that said “If current price drops continue, by 2025 container rates will be negative!!”
From that source, the average rate in May 2019 was about $1350, and according to the most recent datapoint, it's currently at about $1450. In 2019 dollars (using CPI), that's about $1220.
Seems like it is down 10%, but that's not nearly as dramatic as the WSJ graph would make it appear.
Its like throwing a stone in a stagnant pond and watching the waves go up and down.
Except the economic fluid is far more complex, full of lags and hysteresis. E.g. shipping rates have gone down but not the costs (indicated as fuel and labor). Why not?
Nobody wants to leave a crisis go to waste (i.e. groups of people will try to maximize and make their monetary gains permanent) but there are restoring forces towards the underlying equilibrium supply and demand balances.
Value of assets on the balance sheet of the Federal Reserve in 2007: 0.9 trillion
Value of assets on the balance sheet of the Federal Reserve in 2022: 9 trillion
The anti-liquidists (also gold bugs or digital gold bugs) never came to terms with the fact that the human economy - like the human body - is mostly made out of water.
There is a goldilocks hydration level but its not a simple thing to identify as there are countless other complex things going on.
You can say that borrowing from the markets is riskless for the Fed, because it can always pay back with the printing press.
But lending to the markets is still risky: because market participants don't have a printing press to help fall back on.
(In this case, the Fed often also bought some assets and later sold them; that's financially equivalent enough to lending that it doesn't make a difference here.
Especially if the assets you are buying and selling are bonds.)
It's like a conspiracy theory, except the "conspiracy" part is actually true (the Fed was exactly trying to create inflation), but the consequences are fanciful and legion.
(Seemingly) paradoxically, the big Fed balance sheet is also a consequence of not doing enough QE fast enough.
Of course, the Fed isn't responsible for everything. For example, the Fed has nothing to do with the Jones Act.
In the olden days of 2007, banks would only hold as many reserves at the Fed as they legally needed. They would instead invest any extra (or make their deposits less attractive, so that they have fewer excess reserves).
In 2008 the Fed started paying interest on reserves above the legally minimum (so called excess reserves).
Excess reserves parked at the Fed don't contribute to the economy, but are still counted in the Fed balance sheet.
You can see on https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=15mr6 how the level of reserves at the Fed shot from about 0.050 trillion USD in 2007 to about 3 trillion USD today.
It's much weirder. Economics is even fuller of anti-lags, ie clever economic actors are constantly planning for the future and anticipating. Eg if the Fed announces today, that they are going to run the printing presses red-hot next year, you'd already see inflation starting now.
That anticipation is why stock prices started to recover when we were still in the very middle of the pandemic. Contrary to popular opinion, investors are rather long sighted and forward looking. (They just don't always believe managers when they say 'trust me bro, our long term plan might lose money now, but it's totally gonna pay off anytime soon'; and that's why they demand regular quarterly profits from run-of-the-mill management, but let Bezos run Amazon for decades without anything in the way of dividends.)
Contrary to popular opinion investors are a very inhomogeneous crowd: From real economy investors, like the shipping company that tries to anticipate long-term global economic supply and demand patterns and orders massively expensive ships that will only be delivered years down the line, to bloomberg types or crypto speculators or HFT algos, that basically just look at financial timeseries going up or down, detached from any economic, environmental or social reality.
To abuse the liquid analogy just bit more, the fluid is composed of all sorts of molecules. Heavy ones with lots of inertia but also lots of small scale noise. As things are, the incoherent noise sometimes turns coherent (hypes, manias and other delusions) and then the tail wags the dog (to finally switch metaphor :-)
But those that anticipate the future correctly get rewarded with more money, so that over time the average dollar belongs to a smarter investor.
I know the pandemic was new and disorienting, but do these people have no contrarian instincts at all? They just look at what everyone else is doing and do that, lest they stand out and be singled out? If you're in a leadership position and you play the "everyone thought X so you can understand why I did too" card you should be fired.
You mean it is learning? Hysteresis is "local learning".
And it seems like they didn't do the responsible thing and set it aside in a rainy-day fund, but instead they and their competitors went on a shopping spree.
Honestly, the way things have went in the past, I'd say a maximum of three years before the first one whines and calls for government subsidies.
Quite a lot (and barely anything of that is mentioned in Wikipedia):
- 2023: Bollore Logistic, 5 billion € / https://www.dvz.de/rubriken/logistik/detail/news/cma-cgm-gib...
- 2022: GEFCO, .5 billion € / https://trans.info/de/cma-cgm-logistiker-284312
- 2022: Spedag Interfreight, unknown price / https://trans.info/de/cma-cgm-ceva-logistik-296514
- 2022: Colis Prive, unknown price / https://www.dvz.de/rubriken/see/detail/news/cma-cgm-investie...
- 2022: 9% of Air France KLM, .25 billion dollars / https://simpleflying.com/air-france-klm-cma-cgm-partnership/
- 2021: Ingram Micro, 3 billion dollars / https://www.dvz.de/rubriken/see/detail/news/cma-cgm-kauft-ko...
And their competition hasn't been sleeping either, there has been a wave of consolidation and acquisitions.
It's a big shift from 2021, sure, but nobody is surprised by that. It is a slump from 2019, rather than "cratering".
Literally business back to normal dude. Stop wasting our time. Embarrassing from the WSJ.
US unemployment is hovering around 50 years lows. Probably better to look at the actual stats rather than listen to the constant doom-peddling that comes from the media.
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/unemployment-rate
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/labo...
People get strange about unemployment figures and how they are determined but the methodology hasn't changed in decades.
No, its not. It was at a local (but not historic) low during the deepest part of the pandemic recession, and has been recovering rapidly since, looking set to soon reach prepandemic levels and continue the upward trend that was general course since the post-2000 decline bottomed out in 2016.
Looking at the graph you linked it seems this historic low is the new baseline as it has not changed significantly since 2010 aside from a temporary dip in 2020 (gee, I can't imagine why that happened).
If you look specifically at the prime-age labor force participation rate (25-54 years, https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=15nxN), the current figures match pre-pandemic highs, which in turn match the 2004-7 level (pre-financial crisis).
Is there a stat that tracks time to new job after a layoff? I'm betting most of those people found new positions very quickly.
Callous or otherwise, demand was outstripping supply during the pandemic years. Supply could only increase if actual value could be exchanged to pay for it, but we were in a situation where not enough new value was created, and our currency inflated at the same time a lot of people demanded what was in limited supply. E.g., regardless how many inflationary dollars you were willing to pay for it, you still couldn't get a PS5. The supply has still not increased, because dollars are worth less (because everyone has more of them). So cutting demand by making dollars more expensive is the only rational decision. Anything else would be chasing a dragon down an inflationary spiral.
Tl;dr, not everyone can own the newest thing, (because there are fewer of those things than the dollars in circulation) and in order to make the value of dollars reflect that, you kind of have to chop down the demand side by making dollars more valuable / harder to obtain.
The opposite approach is exemplified by the well-meaning but catastrophic attempts over and over in countries like Argentina and Venezuela to fix prices on the supply side to enforce artificial value on an already inflated currency. It's a fool's errand.
When people say their dollars are worth less, the most obvious way to rectify that is to get other people to stop bidding prices up on shit they don't need which they're putting on credit. The only way to do that without further restricting supply is to make credit more expensive.
Related indicators showing certainly a slowdown. Prices did crash but not quantities.
Gold rush competition sets in motion future contractive collapses.
Be not quite the first in, almost first out, and scuttle inventory before the floor falls out.
This isn't a 'tragedy of the commons', wasn't a 'gold rush', and none of the competitors were 'first in' or 'first out'.
> Gold rush competition sets in motion future contractive collapses.
Are you implying that entrepreneurs are idiots who can't anticipate the future that any goldbug and Internet-Austrian obviously can see?
There is no site available that can give a price for which you are sufficiently sure you are getting competitive rate for which the shipment will be actually performed in the time needed. None. Closest you can get is inquire via some of the ocean carriers, 4PL sites, but you have to do this carrier by carrier and yet often you don't get comprehensive number.
Pricing in this industry is extremely opaque, indices quoted here are for the most part rough estimations, representing someone's hopes and dreams.
There's a YC startup, "Flexport", which was supposed to disrupt that. Their pitch: "Flexport is the end-to-end platform for global trade. Book, track and deliver freight shipments from factory floor to customer door." But if you go to their site, you don't see a price list. You get "Hi there ! Click here for a quote or to chat with sales." Same as other freight forwarders.
Anyone claiming there isn’t any evidence the production of necessities is a zero sum game from the perspective of the average person is a deluded fool.
Inflation deflates the public to stabilize and grow buying power of imaginary asset owners. It’s a viral game of make up a reason why a minority are free of real work keeping them breathing.
so you can check if the increase is caused by debasement by looking at the inflation; if the increase in sales dollars is higher than inflation, it means that the debasement isn't an explanation of the increase in sales figures.
cheaper goods re-base the currency. Cheaper goods is deflationary. There is no such situation where raw dollars buy more today and are worth less than they were yesterday; that would be an oxymoron. Of course dollars aren't a great metric for wealth, because they float around like any other fiat currency. But if your Big Mac Index buys you an extra Big Mac, whether because supply increased or demand decreased or shipping just got 90% cheaper, that's the opposite of inflation.
Source production is not only more energy efficient but also a great way to increase profits in certain territories. Also it will balance much of the economy internationally.
(I'd say rainy day but...)