I was wondering how much "front loading" to beat the new taxes on imports might be affecting these strange swings in the port numbers. My wine shop "front loaded" a lot of French wines before the tariff's, which was reflected in inventory accumulation being such a big part of GDP growth in the last 4 quarters, as folks "stocked up" in anticipation of higher tariffs (aka taxes).

Rail carload numbers have been shrinking now for over two years, and although coal numbers are a big part of it, all commodity types have shown losses of late, and TEU's have been, at best "flat".

Excess inventory accumulation, while it can increase the short term quarterly GDP number, is often a harbinger of a slowdown... If you have too much inventory, and it doesn't move, then you stop ordering more, causing slowdowns in production, and eventually layoffs. That's why a lot of folks looking six months out use rail carloadings, as well as things like building permits, to make future economic predictions.

Some of the cause of a lot of TEU loss appears to be from slacking Asian exports of farm and forest products, and a huge decline in prices for things like waste cardboard and recycled paper. I've also heard that America has lost some Asian agricultural markets to Australia, New Zealand, and Chile, since they are now part of the Asia Pacific treaty. Long routings due to low prices for low value exports like scrap paper exports, and the LA/LB first port call, and then as many as three more west coast port stops, and slow steaming for lower fuel consumption cost back to Asia, have also been reported as hurting delivery times to Asia, impacting ag export traffic, as well.