Goldman with a look at the US in the wake of recent shipping issues.
Our weekly bottleneck scale remained at ‘2’ this week; however, the absolute level of our congestion index increased by ~71% w/w, which left the overall congestion scale just~5% below ‘3’ territory following 50 consecutive weeks with readings of‘2’ or below (Exhibit 1).
For this week’s scale and index, the number of container ships waiting to dock and unload goods along the West Coast increased from 0 to 1, while East Coastship backlogs increased from 5 to 30 (Exhibit 6), marking the single-largest weekly East Coast backlog rise we have seen since introducing the congestion index back in November 2021; while the reasoning for this sudden rise in backlogs is not yet completely clear (i.e., East Coast backlogs are now up ~5x YoY), we note that it could be partly attributable to a combination of
