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Feast of famine? 2022 was a year of plenty for ocean carriers - can anything good be expected from 2023?
This looks like our first normalised shipping year in some time, with its slack and peak seasons with the usual conflicting opinions among shippers whether to buy into a long-term contracts or rely on spot market rates.
The last two years have been extraordinary - perhaps even once in a lifetime experiences - as rates rocketed beyond the stratosphere, driven by with both high demand for slots, and their lack of availability with combined with industry-wide deteriorating service and increased unreliability. For shippers to have this rewarded by record carrier profits was truly maddening, but somewhat cushioned by the explosive growth in ecommerce occasioned by the medical madness that gripped the planet.
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Congressional commission indicates armistice 'twixt right and left will forge a united front against China
Signs of unanimity of America's deeply divided right and left political spheres toward China have again surfaced in the report from US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, an independent agency of the US government.
The commission's members, though independent, are picked by the departed leftist Democrat Congress, though one would hardly know it from the hawkish anti-China tone of its latest report.
It includes scathing criticism of President Xi Jinping's “zero-Covid” policy, saying it had badly weakened China’s economy and led to increased repression of the Chinese people, noted Hong Kong's South China Morning Post.
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Capping the price of Russian oil to the EU bureaucrat's taste is not in the interest of people or world shipping
One doubts the success of the European Union's efforts at enforcing collective price-fixing any more than one would bet of success of OPEC efforts in days of yore to stop Nigeria selling cut rate oil when they needed ready cash.
The EU plan was to cap the price of Russian oil, to enforce a low price as Moscow became the only practical short-term supplier. Of course, there is no real oil shortage. What oil supply troubles we face are largely regulatory in nature enacted and enforced by a feminized media, academic, bureaucratic complex that pursues policies against fossil fuels to achieve a utopian emission-free world.
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Risks of nuclear shipping are more political than technical, as they confer power on the powerful
The same unreasonable people who condemned nuclear power as too dangerous for civilian use are about to be persuaded that it is the best thing yet for international shipping.
As usual, this re-empowered, predominantly female constituency that can be scared into doing or preventing anything, will be joined in this by the "smart money" that recognises women's political clout to get what it wants.
No longer influenced by long forgotten scarifying book titles of the 1970s and '80s like "The Unforgiving Energy" and a raft of others of that ilk, they managed to shut down nuclear power generation in the western world while amplifying cries for eco rules, biofuels, wind and wave power all the way to today's anti carbon craze.
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Intra Asia Trade Specialists |
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