From what I’m reading, the troubles should start to pick up now; harbors being quieter, truckers not having work, … Are any shortages noticeable yet?
ETA:
Source: https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/trump-is-a-virus
Businesses have been filling their inventories. That’s ending now. Economic pain in terms of job losses should accelerate now. It will still take up to a few weeks before inventories run empty, and the full impact hits consumers. Even a full reversal of Trumpism couldn’t prevent knock-on effects that last into next year.
OP’s data shows the U.S. is stocking up tremendously in April, and then maintaining year-on-year patterns after that with a slight downturn that doesn’t even compensate for April’s glut.
I haven’t seen this data before but it shows the opposite of the shortage I was expecting.
You seem to be misreading that.
Please correct me, then. The surprising moment came when I noticed the vertical axis is for year-on-year change and not raw tonnage.
Yes. It goes from much higher than last year to much lower.
My read was that it was much higher to prepare inventory for the tariff shock
I think the issue is you’re waiting for the negatives to be equal to the surplus of one month, when the trend (from three points of data so do with that what you will) is negative. So, ostensibly, after enough months of negatives, there will be much, much more negative than positives.
Yup that’s exactly what I was doing, and I was surprised that the negatives won’t catch up until at least 3 months which brings us to July at the earliest.
Yes, and then, or rather now, incoming shipping collapses.
May still be a few weeks more before it’s critical then.