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Central Banks Should Watch Freight, Not Only Wages
Freight rates told us about the last inflation surge months before the price indices did. Most rate-setters still treat them as a curiosity for the shipping pages.
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The Pallet Economy: Two Billion Wooden Squares That Hold Up Trade
Around two billion wooden pallets carry the world's goods, break, get mended and go back to work. Inside a repair yard, a timber-price squeeze and the two standards that never quite fit.
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The Heat Pump Factory Town That Bet on One Product
In Velsdorf, one job in three depends on a single white box that pulls warmth out of cold air. We followed the order book, the payroll and the export plan.
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The Border Town Built of Warehouses
Twelve years ago San Tadeo had forty sheds and one petrol station on the highway. Now it has 214 sheds, a six-kilometre truck queue and a water table falling more than a metre a year.
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Ninety Days With Box NRVU 418220-7
We bolted a tracker inside one forty-foot container and followed it from a furniture factory in Vietnam to a Dutch warehouse and back. It spent 38 of its 90 days standing still.
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The Chokepoint Tracker
A daily count of the ships passing through eight of the narrow places that carry world trade, sorted by type and set against the weeks before.
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The Break Freight Index
A weekly spot rate for a 40-foot container on twelve lanes, built from bookings that were actually made rather than asking prices. How it is built, weighted and revised.
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The Tanker Map
Every crude and LNG tanker we can follow, drawn from the positions they broadcast. What the colours mean, where the map goes blind, and what we choose not to show.
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One Year of Tracking Every Tanker: What We Learned
Twelve months, 7,400 tankers and one false alarm we still think about. The data desk on what a year of ship positions taught us about oil, gas and our own blind spots.
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The Copper Price Nobody Believed
Every desk in London called it a squeeze and told clients to wait. Three weeks later the price has not come back, and the warehouses tell a different story.
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What a Dry Season Taught the Canal Pilots
Low water on Gatun Lake turned every transit into a sum measured in centimetres. The pilots who did the sums already have a list for next year.
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The Container Shortage Is Over. The Container Glut Has Begun.
Eighteen months ago shippers paid anything for a box. Now depots outside Rotterdam stack empties eight high and turn hauliers away at the gate.
Today
All
The Customs Broker's New Colleague Reads Invoices Faster Than She Does
An Antwerp brokerage now lets software propose a tariff code for every invoice line. It clears a thousand lines before lunch. A person still signs, and the vendor's liability ends at a month's fee.
Live: Fog Closes the Elbe Approach, Forty Ships Wait at Anchor
Visibility at the mouth of the Elbe dropped below two hundred metres overnight. Pilots stopped boarding, the anchorage filled and one terminal rewrote its berth plan by the hour.
Live: Copper Jumps After a Landslide Cuts an Andean Mine Road
A landslide overnight has blocked the only road to the Cerro Alto copper mine. No one was hurt, but trucks are stuck, ore is piling up and the copper price is climbing. Follow the updates as they come.
Live: Dollar Slips as Asian Exporters Convert Their Receipts
Exporters in Seoul, Taipei and Tokyo sold dollars into a thin morning market. The euro and the yen are firmer, and shipping stocks with dollar revenue are among the first to feel it. Updates as they come.
Stop Calling It Deglobalisation
Goods have not stopped crossing borders. They have started crossing more of them.
No One on the Bridge
At three in the morning a fishing fleet turned across the bow of a ship with nobody on her bridge. The captain handling it was sitting in a former grain office in Rotterdam.
Shipping
21 stories
Live: Fog Closes the Elbe Approach, Forty Ships Wait at Anchor
Visibility at the mouth of the Elbe dropped below two hundred metres overnight. Pilots stopped boarding, the anchorage filled and one terminal rewrote its berth plan by the hour.
No One on the Bridge
At three in the morning a fishing fleet turned across the bow of a ship with nobody on her bridge. The captain handling it was sitting in a former grain office in Rotterdam.
The Manifest, Episode 40: Fog, Copper and the Crewless Ship
Why container rates keep falling, why smelters are paying miners to take their ore, and what happens on the night a feeder ship sails with nobody aboard.
The Ship That Runs on Its Own Cargo
Every LNG carrier arrives lighter than it left, and the missing gas is no accident. Inside the tank physics that turn a cargo into fuel, and the machines now winning some of it back.
Commodities
9 stories
Energy
12 stories-
4 min
The Ship That Runs on Its Own Cargo
Every LNG carrier arrives lighter than it left, and the missing gas is no accident. Inside the tank physics that turn a cargo into fuel, and the machines now winning some of it back.
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3 min
Bitcoin Miners Are Buying the Gas Oil Fields Used to Burn
On a lease in West Texas, a flare that burned for three years went out last month. The gas now runs a generator, and the generator runs 320 mining machines in two shipping containers. The economics depend on one price.
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3 min
First Ammonia Bunkering: Six Hours, One Hose, Nobody Smelled a Thing
A bunker tanker, a bulk carrier and 410 tonnes of the most toxic fuel shipping has tried. Our camera was on deck from the first mooring line to the last nitrogen purge.
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3 min
Four Rotor Sails and a Headwind: A Week on a Wind-Assisted Bulk Carrier
Four spinning towers, a captain who plans his route around the trade winds, and a fuel log that is kinder on some days than others. We sailed with them for a week.
Money
9 stories
Live: Dollar Slips as Asian Exporters Convert Their Receipts
Exporters in Seoul, Taipei and Tokyo sold dollars into a thin morning market. The euro and the yen are firmer, and shipping stocks with dollar revenue are among the first to feel it. Updates as they come.
Why Your Freight Is Still Invoiced in Dollars
A pump maker in Duisburg sells in euros, pays its staff in euros and trucks its boxes to Rotterdam in euros. The bill for the ocean leg still comes in dollars, and nobody at the company ever chose that.
Bitcoin Miners Are Buying the Gas Oil Fields Used to Burn
On a lease in West Texas, a flare that burned for three years went out last month. The gas now runs a generator, and the generator runs 320 mining machines in two shipping containers. The economics depend on one price.
Yen at the Dock: What a Weak Currency Does to Japan's Shipowners
The family owners of the Seto Inland Sea earn their charter hire in dollars and pay their banks, yards and taxes in yen. When the yen weakens, the same ship earns more at home, and the order books start to fill.
Opinion
All OpinionGoods have not stopped crossing borders. They have started crossing more of them.
Stop Calling It Deglobalisation
Every trade conference I have attended this year has had a panel with deglobalisation in the title. The panellists agree it is happening, disagree on how fast, and go home. I would like to suggest, as politely as a columnist can, that the word is
Ports Are Infrastructure. Price Them Like It.
Ask a harbour master what a berth costs and you will get a tariff book. Ask what the same berth is worth at 06:00 on the first morning after a storm, with fourteen ships at anchor and three terminals asking for the same slot,
The Green Premium Belongs on the Bill of Lading
Every week I talk to someone at a carrier who is trying to sell cleaner shipping and someone at a brand who says they would buy it. They are usually describing the same voyage. They rarely see the same number.
The gap between them is
Weekend feature
Most read
This week-
No One on the Bridge
5 min -
Copper's Quiet Squeeze: Why Smelters Are Paying Miners to Take Their Ore
3 min -
Bitcoin Miners Are Buying the Gas Oil Fields Used to Burn
3 min -
Container Rates Fall for a Sixth Week. Here Is Where the Slack Is.
3 min -
Offshore Wind's Real Bottleneck Is a Ship With Legs
3 min -
Ninety Days With Box NRVU 418220-7
6 min
Trending
Editor's picks
Past picksThree to read
Every Friday the editors pick three stories worth your full attention: one long, one short, one strange.
How a Bicycle Gets Its Nationality
Frame from Vietnam, gears from Japan, wheels laced next door. Whether this bike pays duty depends on a 74-line spreadsheet and a welding hall built partly to change the answer.
Salt, Seen From Above
Pink, turquoise, bone white. A year over one coastal salt works, from the first flooding of the pans to the last harvest, shot from a drone at 120 metres.
Stacked to the Ceiling: What a Warehouse of Unsold Solar Panels Says About the Market
Aisle fourteen holds 61 megawatts of solar modules that nobody has cleared through customs. The pallets have been there since winter, and the price on them has fallen every month.
Long reads
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Episode 1 ·
· 3 min
The Manifest, Episode 40: Fog, Copper and the Crewless Ship
Why container rates keep falling, why smelters are paying miners to take their ore, and what happens on the night a feeder ship sails with nobody aboard.
Play-
3 min
Tariff Engineering, or Why Your Sneakers Have Felt on the Soles
Episode 2 · -
3 min
The Grain Corridor, Told by the People Who Load It
Episode 3 · -
3 min
A Night Shift on the Quay: Forty Metres Up With the Crane Operators
Episode 4 · -
3 min
The Battery Park Next to the Substation
Episode 5 · -
3 min
The Last Paper in Trade: Letters of Credit Go Digital
Episode 6 ·
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Ethereum
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Crypto via CoinGecko, currencies via the ECB
By the numbers
SourcesThe week in freight
Four figures our desks kept coming back to · checked by the data desk
- 6 weeks in a row of falling container spot rates on the Break Freight Index
- 40 ships at anchor off the Elbe at the height of the fog
- 12,000 t of cargo on the first crewless feeder crossing of the North Sea
- 5% of tankers on our map silent for more than twelve hours on an average day
Sources
The Break Freight Index and the Tanker Map, both built by our data desk; the shipping desk's reporting from the Elbe anchorage and from the Skarv's control centre ashore.
The week ahead
Full agendaMonday
- Oct 26 Break Freight Index, weekly release at 10:00 London time
- Oct 26 Harbourline Europe, the ports and terminals conference, opens in Antwerp
Tuesday
- Oct 27 Kessel Bay Port Authority publishes its monthly throughput report
- Oct 27 Harbourline Europe: the carriers' panel on blank sailings
Wednesday
- Oct 28 Monthly options expiry on copper and aluminium
- Oct 28 Harbourline Europe closes
Thursday
- Oct 29 Tanker Map monthly report on silent ships
Friday
- Oct 30 Three to read: the editors' picks of the week
- Oct 30 Chokepoint Tracker weekly summary
From the archive
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Newsroom
All authors-
Maren Okafor Shipping editor11 stories -
Kenji Arakawa Data editor9 stories -
Priya Venkataraman Energy editor8 stories -
Jonas Halvorsen Covers currencies, central banks and trade finance: the plumbing that turns a cargo into a payment8 stories -
Tomás Reyes Commodities correspondent covering copper, lithium and grain from the Andes to the Black Sea7 stories -
Leila Farahani Trade policy reporter6 stories
Reading list
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48 stories
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