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The COVID-19 pandemic is unraveling the economy nationally and globally as most of the world moves toward a lockdown that entails the closure of significant portions of both the service and manufacturing industries. Staying at home may be safer than going to work but it is creating a disastrous situation for the economy. The lack of global leadership to push for international coordination is very telling, and the lack of consistent US policy will make the impact on economic g

Anyone recall the uncertainty of the impact of tariffs on US trade? Now that we are in the coronavirus environment, uncertainty has expanded exponentially as the virus has spread out of China and is impacting other parts of Asia, the United States, Europe and the Middle East. Trade in the first quarter of 2020 has slumped dramatically. The World Bank has already reduced global gross domestic product projections for 2020 from 2.9 percent growth to 2.4 percent and suggests that

Projecting container volume for the next year has become even more challenging with the outbreak of the coronavirus in China and its spread into the rest of Asia, Europe and North America. The tariff war with China had a direct impact on trade in 2019 with US imports declining below their 2018 levels, and further tariff threats against the European Union will not help going forward. Perhaps the Phase 1 agreement with China will alleviate the downward pressure on imports, but

According to the Federal Reserve, the Industrial Production Index has been on a slight decline since January 2018 with only a couple of upticks in August and November of last year. Meanwhile, the Census Bureau’s Total Business Inventory-to-Sales Ratio, which was in decline through April 2018, began to rise relatively sharply throughout the rest of that year. It leveled off at a high of 1.4 in May of last year and has remained there since. This combination of reduced output co

Real gross domestic product in the United States increased 3.2 percent in the first quarter of 2019, according to the federal Bureau of Economic Analysis, and was driven by consumption and fixed non-residential investments. As imports declined due to the large inventory buildup in the last quarter of 2018, the negative impact of that on GDP was lower than normal. In contrast, the US Manufacturing Purchasing Managers Index from IHS Markit was at 52.6 in April, up from both Mar

"Competitiveness" has become a hot topic for US states, municipalities, and ports. With slower post-recession economic and trade g

The world economy, and thereby trade, is heading for a squall.

It turns out trade wars are not so easy to win. The Trump administration has had no real success with China, Canada and Mexico, and is in no

A lack of certainty makes life more complex for most people. Unfortunately, uncertainty is to be found everywhere one looks at present.

We have previously highlighted the difficulty of running economic forecasting models that cannot absorb the wild deviations caused by geo-po