Booming U.S. retaildemand has played an outsized role in container shipping’s historic bull run. 

Aplunge in consumer demand and import orders will have a highly negative effecton spot shipping rates.

Surging inflation anda 0.3% decline in May sales versus April have spurred headlines on a retail“slump.”

Services rebound has notreplaced goods trade

One of the bigtheories during the pandemic was that when consumers could move freely again,they’d switch back to services and goods spending would snap back down topre-COVID levels. This hasn’t happened yet. Spending on services has recoveredbut goods spending stayed elevated

National inventory-to-salesratio hasn’t recovered yet

There’s been a huge amountof focus on this following quarterly reports by Target and others on excessinventories. 

Retail stocks were hammered. There’s a clear belief amongcontainer investors that this could temper import demand. The latest governmentdata we have on this is for April.