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Comment by dalyons | Hacker News Reader

That’s a pretty manipulative graph. Show the pre pandemic spot rates! From the article “ Box-ship operators were among the biggest pandemic winners. Orders for imported goods began to climb in 2020 …” so why doesn’t it show 2020 then?

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Depending on the route, rates are back, or close to, pre pandemic levels, e.g. here

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.

Looking at the exact same source as the WSJ graphic used, you can see it was quite cherrypicked: https://fbx.freightos.com/

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.

For a larger timeframe (and more spot rates): https://en.macromicro.me/collections/4356/freight/44756/drew...

Yes, seems the rates are exactly back to the same level they had been comfortably been sitting at for years before the pandemic: https://fbx.freightos.com/

i checked the BDI https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/baltic

its exactly at the historical 30 year average. nothing to see here lol

Do you know how that index works? Is it inflation adjusted? (Does it even include price components that would need to be inflation adjusted?)

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.

If the chart is not inflation adjusted it means it had been declining in real costs for the 27 previous years, so why is it only a problem now?

Oh, shippers complain from time to time about cost pressures. It's not a problem only now as far as I can tell.

Not saying that the article's framing is correct, but being at the 30y average does sound like a bad situation for shipping companies - they must have had some rising costs.

Or have optimizations and economies of scale in place to offset the increase in costs. My money is on that.

Nobody is interested to read an article an article that says “Container rates have returned to pre-pandemic numbers”.

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!!”

The medium is the message. If you were reading the print version, it likely wouldn't have an editorialized headline. Those are often changed in the 24 hours after publication. But ink is forever.

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