Thanksgiving is over, Christmas is coming, and the East and Gulf Coasts are bracing for another possible International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) strike in January 2025. To give some perspective to what a possible ILA strike means, 45,000 dockworkers at 36 ports on the East and Gulf Coasts from Maine to Texas would not be going… Read more »
Category: Misc.
AI has both rewards and risk.
In 1984, I was a young sales representative for a wholesaler in Pennsylvania. I traveled throughout the states of Pennsylvania and New York, selling our company’s products to businesses, which in turn sold the goods retail to the public. Each day, when the sun was setting, I would finish my day off doing the same… Read more »
The Three Big Cargo Insurance Mistakes
This article is a bit long. You should get a coffee before you start. If you still need to get lunch, grab a sandwich as well. Today, I am writing about the three big things people sometimes get wrong about marine cargo insurance. I have been in cargo risk mitigation and marine cargo insurance for… Read more »
The Houthi rebels are still at it.
Not hearing much about troubles in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden as of late? You are not alone. It isn’t because there is nothing happening because there is. It just isn’t convenient news right now, but troubles are still abound. While the news of major shipping lines announcing in early 2024 that they… Read more »
Ocean rates will rise if Mother Nature and Houthi rebels have their way.
Did you enjoy the downward trend of shipping rates in 2023? You did? That is good because, for the time being, there are very few reasons container rates should not continue to go up. One of the primary reasons for transpacific container volume health is American consumer spending. American consumers, beyond reasonable logic, have still… Read more »
The real cause of most preventable shipping losses.
I draw on personal experiences to form my opinion for many things I write about. When I do this, my writing is still fiction but broadly based on real happenings somewhere, sometime. My experiences enable me to form ‘hypotheses,’ but well short of ‘theories,’ and there is a difference between the two. Suppose you use scientific… Read more »
Cargo insurance and moving your cargo through a country at war.
I recently had a customer ask me for a cargo insurance rate for cargo traveling from Qingdao, China, to Germany. What is interesting about that? It was for ground rail transit that would have the conveyance moving through both Russia and Ukraine, that’s what. My customer explained that getting cargo cover was possible because he… Read more »