'We Currently Have No Container Ships,' Seattle Port Says
newsweek.com232 points by pseudolus a year ago
232 points by pseudolus a year ago
This article first published 2 days ago. Here's one from April 30: https://www.fox13seattle.com/news/rumors-claim-seattle-ports... April 29: https://www.king5.com/article/news/verify/what-we-can-verify... April 28: https://seemorerocks.substack.com/p/port-of-seattle-empty-ze... April 27: https://mishtalk.com/economics/shipping-collapse-port-worker... April 25: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/tariff-tit-for-tat-has...
Seattle/Tacoma Seaport schedule: https://www.nwseaportalliance.com/cargo-operations/vessel-sc...
This article from Dec, '24 says port volume is expected to be lower than pandemic levels until 2029. A lot of chatter around the issue centers on local politics and leaders: https://www.postalley.org/2024/12/26/seattles-port-faces-a-c...
A chunk of the Post Alley article is spent on the observation that a single stevedoring company controls operations at all terminals in Seattle, but not in Tacoma; yet they're both part of the same port alliance.
As is tradition, I'll plug the latest episode of What's Going On With Shipping:
https://youtu.be/QCyB-Ym0ryk?t=947
(the timestamp links to the "May 2025 Estimate" chapter)
Youtube just suggested that to me recently and it's quite an interesting channel with lots of charts and data if you're curious about this stuff.
Yeah, it is a far better source of information than literally anywhere else I have seen for getting commentary on the tariff's actual impact on trade.
A funny thing is the US could easily sanction any country in the 90s because it controlled so much manufacturing. Nowadays we can’t even sanction Houthis since they can get everything from China. Judging by the port situation, soon China can sanction us, easily.
Sanctioning power comes from dollar primacy. When the whole world settles transactions in your currency then you have the power to switch off other countries foreign exchanges pretty easily.
The dollar has been in steady decline since the late 70's. As it's share of reserves drops, do goes the effectiveness of sanctions.
> Sanctioning power comes from dollar primacy
My worries is what sustains the dollar primacy. If the US can't make what's even essential for the nation, I'm curious how other nations will want our so-called services.
> My worries is what sustains the dollar primacy
Manufacturing was never part of the equation. It's somewhat ironically because of the trade deficit. Running a deficit blasts dollars out into the world. Countries put those dollars back in US banks and buy US treasuries as their reserves (hence the dollar as a reserve currency).
It's maybe the best economic deal any country has ever gotten, and the US is in the middle of blowing it all up.
The general idea is to restore that order, and decouple from China. The problem is such things will require serious leadership, not mafia style extortion.
There is no universe where any set of policies will restore manufacturing to the US that can compete with China
I think there is, but it would screw over large capital owners and would be practically impossible in the US political system. The policies I believe could too it are also too radical to realistically be implemented in Europe.
We know that massive investment in early education with tutoring etc. could easily give the average US child the equivalent of today's top 2% level academic performance. This would be expensive, but essentially unproblematic it will never happen. Similarly, university education could be made publicly funded, and also cheaper. Here in Sweden it's cheaper per head than highschool education.
We know that physician labour in the US cost more than it should due to a shortage due to too few residencies. It could be solved tomorrow, and all US medical system problems could be solved over 15-20 years.
You could ensure that there's investment capital and no inflation, sidestepping the simultaneous inflation and need for investment caused by supply shocks due to war and technology change, by making everybody save a certain inflation-dependent fraction of their income from wages.
When a company is doing weird legal stuff to prevent their competitor from opening a warehouse in a certain, crush them-- impose criminal penalties, throw the planners and everyone who knew about the idea in jail.
15 years of this and you'd be in another world, one in which China might not be such a competitor after all. The only reason you aren't moving towards this world is because 'you' in the sense of the donors and the political leadership don't want to do it. There's even people who don't want publicly funded school lunches. With this attitude one makes oneself irrelevant.
I have no idea what any of your comment has to do with manufacturing infrastructure
Manufacturing today is industrial automation, mechanical engineering, etc.
If you want to build it you need capital and a large mass of competent people. China has 4x your population, so if you are to do that match them in the number of people who can come up with a concept for a factory and implement it.
You have no chance without transforming your society. You can't match them and have all this inefficient industry with middle-men and insurance companies, local hospital monopolies, local food monopolies, etc. If you are to have any chance all of that has to go away. You can't have people doing things that don't matter, you have to educate everyone you have, from the earliest education to the later stages to get them to a much higher level of capability than they are at today. You can't waste people on being hungry or not having a tutor.
If you are wasting people on being hungry, not having a tutor, in inefficient middle-men industries, etc. the China will simply steamroll you by being as many as you and us Europeans together even after a population halving and by maintaining their current competence level.
Sure there is, it's just a real monkey's paw.
It would have to be deeply painful and it would take decades. Voters would never tolerate it.
But that's assuming there's even a theoretical way to do it, which there isn't. We just don't have the natural resources or the political structure.
Not proven - america can engage in selected manufacturing esp if profit isn't the main tool of measurement.
Also keep in mind then ... China can't be cheap labor forever either ... either it will regress or we're all be buying from Africa which is the last place there's lower cost labor at scale.
In other words it's a double edge sword for China.
China can have cheap labor forever because they're an authoritarian government that runs "re-education camps" with enormous numbers of people in them.
Uh huh -- eventually even the Chinese won't put up with that in the long term. If however the Chinese gov run things like Russia or NK, for example, I'd reduce TTL by 50%. When fundamental problems persist overly long it goes from problem to distortion to corruption then purifies then explodes out when least expected. Here in the US we're going through a light case of that. Somehow the things Congress is supposed to handle has come out of the morass as President Trump.
Your faith that slavery and authoritarianism can be (and will be) overthrown by citizens is not based on reality.
For the vast majority of human history, most societies were slaveholding monarchies. There's very little incentive for Chinese people to organize when the slaves are "criminals" or Uyghur minorities.
Hey you wanna go there, go there. That's an assignation more severe than anything the west would or could or want to make. Nobody deserves that. N'uff said.
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This would be easier to believe if tariffs were actually helping American manufactures. As of now, the tariffs on raw materials and high uncertainty means life is getting significantly worse for them. Those actions are drastic, yes, but they are harming the wrong side (American one).
It's too bad this administration is taking it's stand very incompetently, by ostracizing all our allies and smashing our govt capacity
you're right but opponents of trump would have far more ground to stand on anything if they started by saying "well we agree with XYZ that trump wants to do, let's offer other strategies he can try if what hes doing now doesnt work".
that is not happening.
Nope. Wholehearted rejection of literally every policy, executive order, layoff, lawsuit, impoundment, appointment that this technofascist wannabe tries to pull. The constitution spells out how he can accomplish his goals, and everything he's trying to do requires an act of congress, and there's been literally nothing. If he's so popular and such a visionary dealmaker, why can't he get literally any actual laws passed through a congress completely controlled by his party?
save your energy for the truly heinous things that trump is going to do (starting with the abrego garcia case, and worse).
then, when you have the time, go read article I section 8 and ask yourself how much stuff that isn't in there congress just decided to start authorizing we do. do that before trotting out constitutionalism arguments -- and then search the constitution for where it says the supreme court should be doing judicial review (I'm not saying it's a bad idea). the constitution is basically meaningless in this country and has been from since the beginning.
I think there's plenty of ground for his critics to stand on.
We already had another strategy, and it was called the trans pacific partnership. Trump pulled the US out of that in his first term.
If Trump was really going to focus on China in a constructive manner, he wouldn’t have gone off and pissed off all of our allies first. Our allies now are just as likely now to form trade agreements with China as they are with the USA, since we now appear just as bad to them as China (even worse, we don’t have much to offer compared to China). As it stands now, China couldn’t have asked for a better situation of American just deciding to go off on everyone at once.
Even Canada is now looking seriously at making a trade agreement with China than with the USA, which was unthinkable just 3 months ago.
"taking a stand" - is this what the narrative is going to shift to when the decades-out-of-date approach of this mentally ill false idol blows up into widespread shortages and high inflation (again) ? "Our country is in ruins, but at least we took a stand"
I think this will be overshadowed by all the other garbage. Kinda like Germans sometimes say „well Hitler built the Autobahn“ but the industrial scale mass murder of minorities and political opponents kinda overshadows this just a little bit (it’s also false. But nobody gives a fuck about the damn highways).
The truth is there is no will to sanction them, same with Russia.
Threat with sanction anyone who do economic activities with houthis and actually do it later.
Huge amount of discussion in this thread neglects the idea that a massive increase in tariffs will throttle trade shipments. Its the obvious expected effect.
Again further stating the obvious here but this is the _desired_ effect. Not saying if that’s good one way or the other but it’s clear the goal is to reduce inbound volume from the world.
Maybe, but no trade means no new money from tariffs and the plan was to confuse the market get massive short term windfall while slowly onshoring those jobs replacing that income through corporate/income tax.
Now we have no trade and a drop in demand for US currency.
> Now we have no trade and a drop in demand for US currency.
Trade hasn't been this fair to the US since before WWII.
That's the period before the US dollar was the world's reserved currency. If things go back to that point it will mean the US couldn't afford to borrow at low rates anymore and would lower the ability to fund the military / society. Before the war the unemployment rate was 25% in the US.
> it’s clear the goal is to reduce inbound volume from the world.
This is painting the bullseye around the arrow - while this was entirely predictable, when did anyone in the administration state that this[1] was the goal? This goal is obviously is contrary to another stated policy goal of lowering inflation.
1. Initially, the stated goal was to make trade imbalances "fair"
If you take "fair" to mean, less imbalanced, that would give three possible solutions: increase exports, decrease imports, or a bit of both. Tariffs only make goods produced within the tariffing country more competitive within that country. I.E. they don't make made in the US goods more competitive outside of the US. Add that to the other stated goal of producing more inside of the US and unless they are expecting a consumption boom to absorb imports and internal production a reduction in imports is a goal.
Also the fact sheet[0] uses a paper which found a reduction in trade with China as evidence for why they should do this which I think is evidence enough that they are hoping for at least a modest reduction in trade "A 2023 report by the U.S. International Trade Commission that analyzed the effects of Section 232 and 301 tariffs on more than $300 billion of U.S. imports found that the tariffs reduced imports from China and effectively stimulated more U.S. production of the tariffed goods, with very minor effects on prices."
[0]: https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/04/fact-sheet-pr...
> Again further stating the obvious here but this is the _desired_ effect.
Hanlon's Razor suggests that your statement is incorrect.
Tariffs need consistency and stability to be effective rather than purely disruptive.
You can see this in how much more effective the countries applying tariffs against the US are handling things. Since they are applying tariffs and leaving them in place, the incentives are working properly, and they are disconnecting from the US businesses.
In the US, by contrast, businesses are either shutting down or holding their breath in the hopes that tariffs will pass.
I think the desire is a stupid one, not a malicious one. If you read through their documentation and their statements they seem to think this is a positive outcome and genuinely desire it.
yes. While the administration is full of wealthy people, the charity they need is all of us assuming they're not morons. Meanwhile, anyone who is not a moron and still feeling charitable is starting to question those assumptions.
By the time the effects get to me, I think it is irrelevant which one of these it is. Functionally stupidity is malice here.
The point of Hanlon's Razor is that stupidity and malice are often indistinguishable and interchangeable.
It doesn't matter to someone getting the pointy end of the stick whether it happened out of malice or stupidity--the pointy end still hurts.
That's obvious. I think the question is more one of how long will they be throttled for? Even if there was a domestic or foreign nontariffed supplier for 100% of the goods in question it would still take significant lead time for the new orders to be filled and even more for cases where capacity needs to be increased.
No one knows, it’s a game of chicken. Will the suppliers eat the tariff cost if they start losing market share? Will consumers just pay the extra cost if they really need the item?
If the latter happens, will a domestic company come in and undercut the international sellers?
If the suppliers decide that it's not worth the risk of letting the consumer to decide to pay the passed on tariff then there simply is no consumer choice.
There needs to exist a domestic supplier to be able to fill the gap. My guess is that for many products, there simply isn't one.
Yeah, standing up a new factory will take five years and hundreds of millions of dollars.
Larger businesses like Apple will cut deals. Smaller businesses will just fold.
The on-again-off-again of the tariffs throws another wrench in there. It would be a big gamble to start building a domestic factory right now because you don’t know if the tariffs are going to stick around long enough to make it worth it. Plus you still have the issue of tariffs on imported materials cutting away at any potential margin.
Looks like this needs updating now https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/chinese-cargo-seattle-tari...
> In fact, the Northwest Seaport Alliance … said it was so far seeing more vessels call into port in 2025 than in 2024, with three more calls in the first quarter of 2025 than during the same period in 2024.
> However, the ships calling into port were arriving with unpredictable volumes of cargo — sometimes 30% less than anticipated
And Snopes felt comfortable rating “mostly false” to the top level claim? I get that they’re trying to navigating treacherous waters, but “there’s still ships, they’re just 1/3 empty” is as much support for the top level claim as it is contradiction
Not the first time their headline has been at odds with their content. I've never really been a fan of this particular outlet, even in their early days I found their self-absorbed writing style insufferable. They strike me as pedantic rather than informative.
Not really, the claim was „the port is empty“, not „the ships arriving are empty“. If there are still ships arriving, the claim is false.
Most of what comprises a port is infrastructure for handling containers and bulk cargo. If cargo volumes are down, some fraction of that infrastructure is disused, or used below its capacity. That a ship was at berth is cold comfort to the longshoremen, truck drivers, etc. who expected to work that cargo, nevermind to the people that expected to, y’know, purchase and consume those goods.
Is 30% underutilized / partially disused tantamount to empty? Maybe not. But it’s in the ballpark in a way the snopes rating undersells.
> But it’s in the ballpark
It is not remotely in the ballpark. The word “empty” is not understood to mean “70% full” anywhere in the English-speaking world.
There are websites that provide tracking for a lot of ships.
For comparison here's Tilbury, near London in the UK: https://www.vesselfinder.com/?p=GBTIL001 you'll note that big cargo vessels are shown in yellow.
And here's the port of Seattle: https://www.vesselfinder.com/?p=USSEA001 You'll note a distinct lack of yellow. If you zoom out a bit you can find some 'bulk carriers' but those aren't container ships.
So when the article quotes the Seattle port commissioner who says "we currently have no container ships at berth" that might be literally true right now at that specific port.
Other US ports seem to be doing better - Perhaps Seattle is badly located or expensive, and has taken a disproportionate fraction of the 30% drop in volumes? There are certainly larger ports on the same coast https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Top_container_ports_...
One sets off for a morning drive on Thanksgiving. Upon entering the freeway, they find the normally traffic-congested road smooth and free-flowing. The journey takes a little more than half the time it usually would. They exclaim "Wow, the roads are empty this morning!"
I'm playing a bit of devils advocate, but it's not inconsistent to observe a typically congested resource X operating at a fraction of its capacity, and note the observation with "wow, X is _empty_".
And if you’re snopes and the claim you’re checking is „the road is empty“, you would rate it as true?
That's why it's just "mostly" false, but 'empty' is a word with a specific meaning, and claim here was that the port is literally empty of ships. (or, in the case of the Twitter message they show, that there's only one single ship in the harbor)
The claim was "at this moment right now, the port is empty". The article then talks about 35% drop of "shipments" and "imports".
Snopes has been pwnd. It now adheres to the standard of literal truth with a political bias. So if someone posts “Bernie Sanders has 30,000 at a rally” (true) but the image is of a different (also true) rally but on a different date, then Snopes just says “it’s false”. Not “true, but the image is wrong”. Not informative, like “Bernie did have 30,000 people attend but this image is from XYZ”. Just says FALSE! Same here.
They've always seemed informative and do a good job of showing their sources. How big a deal is the single-word true/false judgement for an ambiguous claim if all the relevant details are summarized?
They weren’t.
Is this [0] the Snopes article you were talking about, on the Bernie Sander rally?
They rate it "mostly true" and in the summary mentioned the true attendance and the false photo, just like you said they should have.
I don't get what you are saying. They seem on the ball.
[0] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/27000-people-came-to-a-ber...
If I drink 30% of a glass of water, is the glass of water empty?
No, but if the claim is that the glass no longer has any boba it's irrelevant how much liquid you drink.
The specific claim was that the port no longer had any container ships on that specific day. And that claim was true.
Yes, there were other ships in the port. But that's irrelevant. A container ship is a specific kind of cargo ship used for international cargo shipments. In an article about international shipments, that distinctions matters.
These aren’t static systems.
Keep removing 1 cup of water and add 2/3 cups and eventually it goes to zero. For a port that very well may be sending people home early on an ‘empty’ port. Even if tomorrow brings in new ships for now it looks like a ghost town.
And then at one port on one day zero cargo ships showed up.
If I drink 30% less water overall, I’d be pretty unhealthy.
That is irrelevant. The question was weather or not the ports can be considered empty if some ships are up to 30% empty, which is not the case. Emptiness can be more encompassing than 0% (there is still some residual water in an “empty” glass of water), but it isn’t so expansive as to range from >0% to 70%.
You’re speaking about technicalities. There shouldn’t be any argument that our economy will continue to be fucked by tariffs and supply issues. 30 percent is massive.
It's not a technicality, it's literally what the claim was: "Seattle's marine cargo terminals were empty and international vessels had stopped calling into the port as of April 29, 2025, due to the U.S.'s newly imposed tariffs."
The fact that the terminals are not empty doesn't mean the economy isn't fucked, so there's no reason to argue about it either way.
We’re sitting here arguing about the obviously incorrect title and America is burning, so we are speaking about the wrong thing. It’s irrelevant whether it’s 70 or 0 percent, we’re still fucked. Discussing the issue of 70 vs 0 percent isn’t going to solve how fucked we are, so it’s a technicality.
