China’s ‘Covid Port Crisis’: Gateway To Covid Zero, More Lockdowns, More Vaccine Mandates
Episode 14: China's new lockdowns impact their biggest ports. This opens the door to the Davos crowd stopping the anti-lockdown, anti-compulsory vaccine movement in the West.
We like to think the CCP is the problem. It’s their enablers in the Davos Universe that we need to watch out for. Welcome to the Double Plus. If you like what you read, consider subscribing. It’s free.
On June 4, I said that China was likely over-exaggerating their new Sars2 outbreak. You know, the virus they engineered in the Wuhan lab that all of the media said was fake news and those who reported on it (like me) were on the receiving end of angry emails from editors. But I digress.
Let’s get down to the matter at hand, which is the port blockage in Yantian. Our friend Elon Musk has things on those cargo ships waiting for shipment, but alas, with Chinese workers staying home due to new lockdown restrictions, the ships aren’t docking, and they’re not going out.
Notice this is happening as the U.S. is lifting restrictions. (EU is a waste of time. It’s totally captured by China and the Davos view of the world.) And notice how this is happening as the U.S. starts pumping out headlines about inflation.
Supply chain bottlenecks in China will mean higher prices for freight, and higher prices for things on those ships, unless demand collapses. Everyone views inflation as bad. You’ll get negative real interest rates (we are there already), lost savings for the riff-raff who don’t own a thousand shares of Amazon, and a general slowdown in the American economy as consumers get sick of paying high prices. Their wages would have to inflate with it, and seeing how corporate America is not all that interested in reshoring supply chains to China, as the recent Senate China bill serves as testament, then higher inflation – if you’re Beijing – is a negative for the U.S. economy.
That’s when the Chinese economy comes to the rescue. Thank God, for China!
Lori Ann LaRocco, author of the book Trade War: Containers Don’t Lie, is the best port watcher I know. She is a columnist for American Shipper magazine. Though I would call her more of a reporter, than a columnist.
On Wednesday, she wrote that the Yantian port blockage might be worst than the Suez Canal clog from earlier this year.
Without citing LaRocco, Harvard Business School professor Willy Shih, writing in Forbes says exactly the same thing.
An outbreak led to a five-day traffic halt for inbound container deliveries to the Yantian International Container Terminal in Shenzhen at the end of May and it is still not operating anywhere near full capacity. Yantian is the largest container terminal in the Pearl River delta, and one of the largest in the world.
There has been no significant increase in the number of people returning to work at the port, which currently has 27 ships waiting to load and unload. The median wait time at Yantian for containerships two weeks ago was 1.2 days. Today this wait time has doubled to over 3.3 days. Almost all of those ships are U.S. bound.
SONAR data for the Port of Yantian shows the number of TEUs that arrive into U.S. ports weekly. The largest-named consignee is TV maker TTE Technologies. Other big brands of note are Tesla, Williams-Sonoma, QVC, JoAnn Fabrics and Hasbro, LaRocco says.
LaRocco writes:
MarineTraffic data shows the ports of Hong Kong and Nansha are overflowing with vessels. There are 58 cargo vessels at anchor with Hong Kong as their final destination and 25 cargo vessels at anchor at Nansha, which according to SONAR data shows Electrolux Home Products as the main branded consignee. The port of Shekou has 14 cargo vessels at anchor.
“This is a result of the diversion and the inability of these ports to process because of the lack of equipment and capacity,” said Jon Monroe of Monroe Consulting. “The congestion at Yantian and the ripple effects on the alternate port destinations have snarled trade worse than the Suez blockage.
“Right now we are telling customers there is no plan B to this situation.”
China is saying it only has a few cases, and no one is dying. So they are counting asymptomatic cases and gearing up to hand the baton to panic porn stars in the West that are going to lockdown again in the fall when the new murder hornet-Omega Sars virus (which we don’t know from where it came) sideswipes all the vaccines. Of course, I’m making this up. But it might come true even if it’s make-believe for now. Well, for sure the murder hornet aspect is not going to happen. Though if I did, I better get into fortune-telling.
Meanwhile, be on the lookout for the CCP to start building MASH units in Guangzhou or in Shenzhen. If that happens, expect more talk of a return to lockdowns and compulsory vaccine policies enforced not by the public sector, but by the private sector that will say no vaccine, no work.
China’s latest “outbreak” may be legit for all I know. But for the West, it’s just part of the script to push the Covid Zero, Full Vaccine policy supported by Davos Man. And China knows it, and welcomes it.