The old Harry Truman joke was that if you laid all the economists end to end, you couldn’t reach a conclusion; that may well be true of folks who are forecasting container transport volumes.
On one hand, we have the monthly Global Port Tracker report, which is forecasting a 25% rise in containerized traffic from for the first quarter of 2010 compared with the first quarter of 2009. The report is put out by the National Retail Federation, who may well be cheerleading people into stores to buy all those imports.
President Truman always longed for a one-handed economist, because the able-bodied ones always added “On the other hand …” Playing the second hand, we have a major railroad executive expecting international intermodal shipping to be flat for 2010.
However, those two factoids could coexist nicely. If traffic rebounded in the last part of 2009, we could have container trucking going to stores up quite a bit from early 2009 and yet be stable when compared with late 2009. The other prospect, which goes against trends, is for intermodal to get a smaller share of import traffic. Given that we’re seeing an increase in intermodal traffic over the years, a reversal of intermodal market share seems unlikely.
Chrystal balls have a way of getting rather hazy, especially on the economic front. We’re not quite sure what 2010 will bring yet, as there are too many variables at play to make a firm conclusion of where the world economy is going.
Sources:http://www.joc.com/node/416609
http://www.cargobusinessnews.com/news/monday/news1.html
Tags: container transport, container trucking, freight, freight forwarders, freight moving, freight shipping, freight transport, heavy haul, moving freight, shipping freight, trucking companies, trucking services, Trucking transport