LONDON: Imports fell in both September and October at each of the three biggest seaports
The rush of consumer traffic at America’s most popular stores in the weeks before Christmas is usually preceded by heavy traffic at American ports. But not this year.
As The Wall Street Journal‘s Robbie Whelan points out in a report on Sunday, imports fell by 10% between August and October at the country’s three biggest seaports—Los Angeles, Long Beach, and New York harbor—during a period known as “peak shipping season,” when American retailers are preparing inventories for the holiday rush. Writes Whelan.
Some of the country’s biggest trucking companies and railroads have recently reported weaker-than-expected earnings. Many have cut the rates they charge customers as demand sagged during what is usually their strongest months. For trucking companies in particular the turnabout has been abrupt, with some companies pivoting from expressing concerns about tight capacity to worries about future profits in the space of a few weeks.
How can we reconcile these data, which show weak demand for imports and for the services that ship goods around the United States, with the conventional wisdom that the U.S. economy is improving enough that the Federal Reserve can raise interest rates next month?
For one, extenuating circumstances can explain what’s going on at American ports. Ports on the West Coast recently suffered through a months-long labor dispute that has made trade data coming out of L.A. and Long Beach difficult to analyze. Last October, merchants rushed orders before the strike to make sure they had inventory on hand for the 2014 holiday season. That artificially inflated imports last year and has exacerbated the year-over-year decline.
