Was 2019 Really the Last Normal Year?
Jock O’Connell
If only because it immediately preceded the social and economic convulsion brought on by the global outbreak of the COVID-19 virus in early 2020, the preceding year has come to be regarded by many as a benchmark for normality. When, we wondered innumerable times as the pandemic ran its course, will life return to the way it was before the plague struck? When can we get back t Normal?
In the maritime trade industry, the big question has been how long would it take for the old, familiar rhythms of container traffic to reassert themselves?
Unfortunately, the passage of time tends to rub down the rough edges of the past. As even a cursory check of the year’s headlines in the Journal of Commerce will attest, 2019 was a year of much tumult, especially for importers made nervous by President Trump’s nearly incessant talk about tariffs. You remember, the tariffs he assured us that foreigners would pay.
Exhibit A displays the number of import loads for each month between January 2018 through April 2023, according to the National Retail Federation’s Global Port Tracker (NRF/GPT), which monitors container traffic at America’s thirteen largest seaports. What it reveals very dramatically is the depth of the trough in early 2020 and the tsunami of import traffic that subsequently hit America’s ports.
Exhibit B, which also employs NRF/GPT data, offers a closer view of the “normality” that preceded the pandemic. Inbound loads in both 2018 and 2019 tracked each other closely until the last quarter of 2019, when import traffic unexpectedly tailed off nationally.
In its outlook that September, the NRF/GPT anticipated that a new set of tariffs President Trump had threatened to impose in December would continue to drive up import traffic. Accordingly, the NRF/GPT forecast looked for the arrival of 1.92 million import TEUs in October, 1.97 million in November, and 1.77 million in December. In the end, though, fewer boxes than anticipated materialized.
October saw the arrival of 1.88 million import TEUs, 1.67 million in November, and 1.72 million in December. Not only were the actual fourth quarter TEU counts lower than were forecast by the NRF/GPT, they were also down sharply from a year earlier, as Exhibit C shows. But what’s normal in one setting isn’t necessarily normal in another.
For one thing, not all ports hit their pre-pandemic peaks in 2019. The number of inbound loaded TEUs at the Port of Los Angeles, for example, was higher in both 2017 and 2018 than in 2019. Exactly the same was true across the street at the Port of Long Beach. At the Northwest Seaport Alliance, more imported containers showed up in 2016, 2017, and 2018 than in 2019. Oakland was the only major U.S. West Coast ports to post a year-over-year gain in inbound loads in 2019.
As Exhibit D indicates, 2019 played out very differently based on where you stood…or which ocean your waterfront faced. In the year’s final quarter, inbound loads surged at the two San Pedro Bay ports, went flat at Houston, and plunged (at least in December) at the Port of New York/New Jersey.
So it’s not at all clear what was so normal about pre- pandemic 2019, except that
it was much less calamitous than what followed.
Disclaimer: The views expressed in Jock’s commentaries are his own and may not reflect the positions of the Pacific Merchant Shipping Association.
