Shipping container rates have been dropping since early March – right around the time when we had just experienced our “collateral days” and then stood by to witness chaotic financial fireworks, inversions, the whole thing. The bane of the logistical supply-side snafu-ing, it has been container redistribution mucking the goods economy up. The recent and sharp decline in container rates, [...]
This whole “inflation” scenario isn’t really that difficult to piece together, effect from cause. Sure, Jay Powell’s trying to nuke it by hiking the federal funds rate, but no one really uses fed funds and the problem isn’t the unsecured cost of borrowing bank reserves (not money) that are literally overflowing. For one, the FOMC’s efforts aren’t going to get [...]
Are giant French freightliners really so generous? Big companies can be known for their philanthropy, of course, but such efforts aren’t usually folded into their own business activities. Generally speaking, the beneficiaries of corporate charity tend to be strangers. If determined giving is actually being applied within the narrower confines of the corporation, that’s not altruïsm but economics (small “e”). [...]
It’s not just the trade data from individual countries. Take the WTO’s estimates which are derived from exports and imports going into or out of nearly all of them. These figures show that for all that recovery glory being printed up out of Uncle Sam’s checkbook, the American West Coast might be the only place where we can find anything [...]
It infects every boardroom across the world. Big business requires decent forecasting, yet time and again it seems they are deprived of what they desperately need. Instead, even after this last decade, the world’s largest companies continue to be surprised by weakness that is far more prevalent than strength. It has been the one constant. Central bankers declare their policies [...]
There was a lot of talk about the supposed oil supply glut around early 2015, for good reasons that only partially related to the supply of oil. That wasn’t the only industry impacted by what was really going on, meaning the falling demand side to the world economy. Shipping companies have faced a supply glut of their own, but one [...]
In August last year, Caterpillar announced that it was moving manufacturing jobs back to America from Mexico. The truck and equipment company had entered what is called the “vocational truck” business back in 2011 but in a partnership with Navistar. Using its facility in Escobedo, Nuevo Leon, Navistar assembled these vocational units for Caterpillar under that Caterpillar’s brand. Last year’s [...]
The underlying fundamentals of oil and energy remain highly negative. Oil prices have been supported by sentiment for some time now, but that hasn’t changed much from between under $30 to over $40 at the front end. In the latest weekly update from the US EIA, domestic oil production fell rather sharply in the last week of April. It was [...]
Given that Black Friday weekend, including Thanksgiving itself, was uninspiring, the fact that the Commerce Department’s estimates for retail sales for all of November were again among the worst shows that Black Friday actually remains a pivotal part of the holiday setup. The trend has been to dismiss the traditional Christmas buying season kickoff as if earlier discounts might have [...]
The global supply chain is pretty well established at this point, particularly in the years since the obvious dollar devaluation (Y2K and forward). Commodity countries like the BRICs (South Africa only gets included in BRICS when gold is mentioned) ship to manufacturing centers in the east, primarily China, that assemble and manufacture for further embarkation to end markets in the [...]
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