Port stoppages rob the Chinese of hard capitol.
Why do you think they're running out of coal?
We've got inexplicable slowdowns at ports and transport hubs.
Who does that hurt most?
Many people think that it's an attempt to strangle the US economy with parts or food shortages. Maybe that's so.
But.
What if the net effect is to strangle the Chinese economy?
Nobody gets paid until those boats can return and pick up another load of rubber dog doo.
Every day they sit at anchor deprived China of desperately needed hard currency. They need dollars MUCH worse than we need cheap plastic crap.
They can mollify internal investors by printing yuan but they're not making dollar denominated interest payments.
I suspect that their dollar reserves are critically low. If not, would they be missing puny $40-50M payments?
China is :
Missing dollar denominate bond payments.
One of their big companies is defaulting tomorrow.
Running out of (imported) coal
Running out of raw materials that they can't steal from Africa.
Meanwhile, we've got hundreds of container ships full of paid for goods waiting to unload.
Not much of that is food or food products.
It's almost entirely stuff we can do without for a while
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/09/22/bdff-s22.html
Exactly anon.
There are only so many ships, so many crews, so many containers and so many container berths.
Wen it all jams, they're fooked.
Simpsons getting blood transfusion from children
Check out Savannah. They usually do traffic mostly from Europe and Africa. plus coastal stuff from NY, Charlseton and Jacksonville.
Right now they've got for 10k+ box ships that transited the panama canal in their anchorage and only 5 container berths.
Ordinarily, there are 6-10 ships off the coast, Today there are 24
A ship typically transits Savannah in about 4 days. If one of these big dogs does a full unload and load, they'll tie up 20-25% of their capacity for at least a month.
The people running the ships are doing ANYTHING to get unloaded and back to sea and they're overwhelming the smaller ports.
The net effect will be disruptions in coastal shipping.
Ships that normally transit NY to JAX in 10 days will take 30 or 40. Amazon is hiring ships with on board cranes so they can unload at flat docks in places like Houston but that's no substitute for a full port with the big gantry cranes.
You can move 100 containers that way but they need to move tens of thousands.
I suspect that the whole thing is going to stop for a while. Nothing in. Nothing out.