Primarily that under the current administration the US is rapidly withdrawing from the global order that has existed since the end of World War Two which brought over 70 years of relative prosperity that encouraged global trade. The American hegemony is beginning to disappear.<\/p>\n
The tariff increases on steel and aluminium for \u201cnational security reasons\u201d has resulted in the beginnings of a trade war as the EU responded with tit-for-tat tariffs aimed at specific sectors of the US economy and the political voter base that supports Trump. The US response to this is to threaten tariffs on EU produced cars and parts. And so it continues.<\/p>\n
The trade war with China is also heating up but China is limited in its response as US exports cannot match imports from China in value. Mexico and Canada are next in line and South Korea and Taiwan are not far behind.<\/p>\n
What does this have to do with ports you might ask? Perhaps very little if we are lucky, or a lot, if trade starts to decline. The impact on the transatlantic trade will be minimal as the volume of trade is not that large. The bigger impact will be on trade with China and other Asian countries.<\/p>\n
So far there has been little if any impact on trade volumes. It is early days yet, but by the end of the year and into 2019 we can expect a slowdown in global trade as tariffs begin to bite and the number of companies unwilling to subsidise the tariff increase \u2013 as Harley Davidson has said it will do until it shifts production to Thailand.<\/p>\n
European ports should see very little loss of cargo, but Chinese and American ports most certainly will as the trade war heats up. There will be no winners, only losers, and they will be mainly concentrated in the US. The bulk agricultural export trade will be hard hit, as will imports to US industry. Ultimately the American farmers and consumers will bear the brunt of Trump\u2019s trade war.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
COMMENT: Donald Trump went to the G7 meeting last month and effectively filed for divorce from Western democratic allies and aligned himself with President Putin. What can we read into this, asks Ben Hackett.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":182,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[66],"tags":[],"sponsor":[],"class_list":["post-181","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-economist"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=181"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":183,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181\/revisions\/183"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/182"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=181"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=181"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=181"},{"taxonomy":"sponsor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/sponsor?post=181"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}