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Comment by marcosdumay | Hacker News Reader

I have been looking for an explanation to the US empty ports news. The best one I came with is that ships have been switching their destination ports to some that they could reach before the tariffs or some that have available tariff-free storage where the cargo can stay until Trump backpedals.

The total cargo volume seems to be falling only now, what still may be just noise.

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The simple explanation is that many (but not all) exporters simply stopped exporting things in April (as those shipments would have arrived in May, after the tariffs took effect). And many of the factories overseas have cut back on production, especially of low-value goods most affected by tariffs. Smaller ports like Seattle generally handle the overflow from the bigger ports, so they're the first to be affected by the reduction in cargo traffic.

Even if tariffs are reduced/eliminated, there will still be a lag of 3-6 weeks before destination-port cargo traffic picks up again, assuming that there is product overseas ready to be shipped.

My understanding is that ship tarrifs are calculated at the time of departure, not arrival. This supports the delayed volume reduction since we see the change 22 to 40 days delayed (Pacific transit time).

These in particular are calculated based on time of departure. I don’t believe that’s the common case though.

Right, be interesting to see if the departure volume also dropped or how long it lags behind arrivals.

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