Justin Fox, Columnist

Container Shipping Is Booming Again. That Probably Won’t Last.

An era of globalization has ended, and the new one will probably mean less stuff on ships.

December 3, 2020 at 2:33 PM UTC

Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business, economics and other topics involving charts. A former editorial director of the Harvard Business Review, he is author of “The Myth of the Rational Market.”

Moving again, for now.
Photographer: AFP/AFP/Getty Images

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The two busiest ports in the U.S., the neighboring facilities of Los Angeles and Long Beach, have been setting new monthly records for inbound container traffic this summer and fall, with ships from Asia lining up offshore as they wait for berths to open up.

It would be a mistake, though, to read into this a major revival of global trade.