Long without a logistics and shipping specialist, in other words decades, the Grey Lady, as the news outlet was called long before its voyage into all things digital, recently deployed a veteran business writer to cover shipping subjects. I will spare the critique of his work, but spoiler the cargo side does all the talking, which unfortunately gets portrayed as “news”, but I am wondering whether the coverage in the NYT means that the supply chain crisis, however you define it, is over and done with.
Recently, though the NYT writer did offer a relatively balanced view, in an article about the Federal Maritime Commission (FMC), thrust into the news this year- including a visit by the agency’s Chairperson, Mr. Daniel Maffei, who toured the docks with Bethann Rooney, who heads up Port Commerce at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Kudos on that.
Specialised transport media often have deep relationships with good sources (who may not want their names out there) but have a good pulse on what’s happening on the docks. Broad business media get into some of the underlying facts - though the Wall Street Journal, with a cadre of dedicated transport writers, surprisingly, was reporting recently that congestion had spread to the East Coast.
But there is literally a tangle of statistical sources that can be contorted to support any number of conclusions - often pointing in different directions.
Then we have public pronouncements; not surprisingly the carriers show booking and rates steady or upward, while the ports show fewer ships anchored in the roadsteads.
The mainstream media, I would put the television and news networks here, are driven by sensationalism, which could just as easily be celebrity / political exploits as they could be supply chain problems. But the late 2021/ 2022 difficulties with shipments of containerized cargoes made Maersk a household name (along with the Kardashians or maybe Jeff Bezos or Donald Trump), which I would classify as a mainstream breakthrough.
So happily, with goods moving more smoothly, the shipping guys have dropped below the radar. The main news networks are no longer showing vessels anchored at San Pedro Bay (Los Angeles/Long Beach) on the news; the fact is that the ships are now circling around farther out in the ocean, a fact lost on non-shipping insiders.
But we have seen some great gaffes- think about MarineTraffic screenshots in mainstream media articles during Chinese lockdowns earlier this year, showing thousands of vessels anchored off China. Ooops, turns out they are nearly all fishing boats. The Ambrose Anchorage outside New York has seen a small buildup of green dots, liners anchored, but insiders tell me that they are not all going to the Ports of New York and New Jersey.
More recently, there has been considerable confusion about the rates of change in container rates, on graphs all pointing downward, in line with an “easing” of supply chain tightness, versus their still high absolute levels. As I tweeted recently, “amazing how you can torture data”. It’s easy to point out one particular piece of the supply chain jigsaw puzzle; it’s harder to contextualize on where, exactly, that piece fits into a bigger canvas. That’s really an important to emphasize on any coverage of shipping- especially by the mainstream, and some of the general business outlets; industry specialists know much better where a particular item fits.
Then there is social media, where a combination of shipping savvy academics, market participants and investors can rant and run free. Like the established media outlets, their “predictions”, if you can call them that, are all over the place; each comment points, laser-like, at a particular item in that vast puzzle.
I think of all the jigsaw puzzles that I did in the early 2020 “stay at home” days of the pandemic. Yes, I started around the edges and put some pieces together- but there were still hundreds of the other puzzle components that needed to be properly placed to provide a real picture.
On the shipping meets media horizon, the crisis in the Ukraine, and particularly shipments of grains and armaments, are also shining a light on the business, albeit a different corner than the supply chains which have enabled the mainstream breakthrough. The dynamics here are a little different, with the shipping experts maybe less savvy on the geopolitics driving demand in these instances
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