If it looks like a cartel and walks like a cartel, it must be a cartel according to the regulators.<\/p>\n
But there are other problems which will impact the maritime industry, whether it be the ports or the carriers; they are economic in nature.<\/p>\n
Outside of Europe we have seen one of the longest growth cycles for a very long time. It may not have been stellar in performance, but growth has been positive in Asia and the Americas. That is, until the end of last year, then the US GDP lost its footing and collapsed from 2.6% growth to a 2.9% decline in Q1 2014.<\/p>\n
The weather was blamed, but when one looks at consumption we can also see that the consumer appears to have taken fright over something as they have scaled back purchases below their net disposable income.<\/p>\n
In Europe the French economy is taking a nose dive and Germany’s recovery is steady but no longer accelerating and business confidence fell back slightly in June. The widely observed index by the IFO Institute dropped to its lowest level since December 2013.<\/p>\n
After marginal growth of 0.8% in the first quarter of 2014, the German economy appears to be slowing in the second quarter. Suggestions to that effect seem to be substantiated by a second month of falling business activity in the Eurozone.<\/p>\n
Much of the pressure on the global economy can be laid on the political uncertainties surrounding the Ukraine-Russia crisis and the turmoil in the Middle East with Syria, Iraq and Egypt all fighting militants of one persuasion or another. If this continues, and there are no signs of it not continuing, then it might be wise to start thinking of Plan B for 2015 and assume that we may well be entering a recession and trade downturn.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
China has scuttled the development of super alliances with its negative decision on the P3 whose rationale was for joint fleet management by the top three carriers which would have resulted in a reduction of capacity, which in turn would lead to a rise in freight rates.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[66],"tags":[],"sponsor":[],"class_list":["post-9101","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-economist"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9101","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=9101"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9101\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9101"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9101"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9101"},{"taxonomy":"sponsor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/sponsor?post=9101"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}