Global shipping gauges bottom out steaming toward calmer waters

For all the hopes and analyst bets that the U.S.-China truce will lift the global economy in 2020, shipping gauges aren’t providing much optimism that a rebound will be quick.

Traffic at some of the world’s most significant ports has a lot of ground to make up, according to the latest data on our Trade Tracker:

• A Los Angeles port gauge of inbound containers has spent three straight months in the “red zone” — marking below-normal performance compared with its long-run average.
• Trade-heavy Singapore slipped in December to the slowest cargo traffic growth in four months.
• And Hong Kong — no doubt battling headwinds amid ongoing domestic protests — finished 2019 almost as sour as it started.

The sickly shipping dashboard on the Tracker matches the sagging sentiment and country export categories, with the 10 indicators together painting a lackluster picture of global trade. We’ve been following these gauges for more than a year, with some improving in fits and starts as tariff battles raged then waned.

But the latest data are a reminder that it could take a while to pump more steam into trade flows. For one thing, U.S.-China détentes have shown quick reversals before, interrupting progress in these gauges. And the phase-one deal that the world’s two largest economies signed last week will take a while to implement, and even after it’s in place, the accord keeps in place some $370 billion in tariffs on Chinese imports as well as Beijing’s retaliatory levies.

So the watchword for those eager to see green again is patience: The numbers could get quite a bit noisier from here, as the unusually early Lunar New Year will start to make the results difficult to interpret over the next few months even more so than in a typical year.