Фейковая новость о «пустых портах, пустых полках» терпит эффектный крах

It was about one month ago, when as stocks tumbled, economists rushed to catch down to the sliding market by doing what they do best: chasing prices (in this case lower) by slashing their economic forecasts (most notably Goldman Sachs) a move which we mocked at the time, and correctly predicted it would be about a month before these same economists made an „unrecession” their base case once stocks rebounded.

Will be so slightly awkward when all the banks who made a recession their base case this week, make an unrecession their base case in 1 month.

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) April 8, 2025

It took less than a month for this forecast to come true, and now that stocks have erased all of their post Liberation Day losses, one of the most closely followed people on Wall Street, Goldman’s chief economist Jan Hatzius, said on CNBC on May 2 – just weeks after declaring that a recession was his base case for 90 minutes – that „The most recent information is certainly consistent with the economy not going through a recession right now”.

Of course, the concurrent surge in the Atlanta Fed real-time GDP tracker from -3% (which was dead wrong to where Q1 GDP actually printed) to +2.4% in Q2, only cemented a non-recession base case…

Regional Fed GDP tracking update pic.twitter.com/02r2VVLoXX

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) April 30, 2025

… because the technical definition of a recession – two consecutive negative quarters – meant that with Q2 GDP set to print well in the green, the earliest the US could be declared to be in an official recession was some time in early 2026 when the Q4 2025 GDP number would come out.

This was devastating to the liberal wing of the economic profession, not to mention the mainstream media, all of whom had decided that a Trump recession was imminent, and so they had to pivot to something else that would trigger a daily doom and gloom narrative.

That something was the hypothesis that with trade war between the US and China raging, it was only a matter of time before west coast ports were empty, as no Chinese containerships would come to the US, and the result would be a covid-like panic scramble for products (remember the legendary toilet paper runs) amid a historic inventory destocking.

It was as if the media turned on a dime, and with the „looming recession” narrative suddenly left in the dust, it was instead replaced with story after story about the looming port crisis that would, gasp, result in covid-like empty shelves everywhere across America!

„Trump’s tariffs hit the West’s busiest port – with traffic down by nearly a third” blasted Sky News, „Why U.S. Ports Are Emptying Out Before Tariffs Hit Harder” asked rhetorically Inc, magazine. „Empty Store Shelves Might Be Coming Sooner Than You Think” cried Bloomberg’s unerringly liberal talking heads and Reuters, never one to miss an opportunity to amplify an anti-Trump narrative, no matter how credible, echoed „Shipping volume will plummet 35% next week, LA port official says in CNBC interview.”

You get the picture.

But that was just the beginning, because the liberal media was only just starting its fearmongering campaign to get Americans to panic and to rush out and start stockpiling toilet paper once again. In other words, the „independent press” was hoping to cause the very catastrophic outcome it was „warning” about.

Nowhere was this more evident than on MSNBC where anchor and former Deutsche Bank bond salesman, Stephanie Ruhle, no longer an expert intimately familiar with Under Armor (and especially its CEO), but now a full-blown trade guru, declared that „Donald Trump has been told look at the cargo ships coming in to Seattle, the port of Los Angeles, pick the port. Those ports are getting fewer and fewer ships with less and less cargo. And unless he turns this around, three weeks from now, you walk into a store and we’re going to have a covid-like supply chain crisis, and Trump is looking for an exit.”

„Unless he turns this around, three weeks from now, you walk into a store and we’re going to have a covid-like supply chain crisis, and Trump is looking for an exit” — here’s the @SRuhle commentary that triggered a Trump Truth Social meltdown pic.twitter.com/hzmP9uGTqu

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 9, 2025

But, as always happens, it was CNN that finally took this „broken telephone” narrative to its absurd conclusion, when the media outlet that has become the butt of all propaganda jokes declared that „Zero ships from China are bound for California’s top ports. Officials haven’t seen that since the pandemic.”

… an article written by CNN’s Business and Politics correspondent, Vanessa Yurkevich, who like MSNBC’s Ruhle above, is now a full-blown expert on naval commerce and logistics as a quick scan of her latest articles reveals.

So up until this point we had stayed away from this idiotic discussion, which merely demonstrated how little understanding so-called experts actually have of a nuanced and complicated topic as trade and global commerce.

However, CNN’s idiocy was the last straw.

But before we go there, a quick look at what has been really taking place.

First, regarding the claim that west coast ports have seen a sharp drop in inbound traffic, there certainly has been a modest decline in February and March inbound traffic, but a decline from a near-record print in January, which in turn was the result of inventory restocking ahead of what most retailers knew would be a trade war. After all, Trump had made it clear about a year ago that he had every intention of restarting trade war with the world, and especially China, and only someone watching CNN would be surprised by the recent sharp spike in tariffs, a move which incidentally was never meant to be permanent but was a strategy meant to inflict max pain and get trading partners to the negotiating table. In any case, the total inbound traffic to California ports shown below is hardly the apocalypse the liberal media has been making it out to be (and even Reuters discusses this in „Near-record US container import streak expected to snap in May due to tariffs”).

Then, addressing the topic of imminent product shortages, this was another fake news narrative meant to spark panic and chaos, and resulting in just the outcome the media was „warning” about. Because if it hurts Trump, it’s great for MSNBC and CNN… and of course China, which begs the question: just how much „ad dollars” and/or sponsorship have these media outlets received from Beijing and Chinese companies in recent months. As the following charts from Deutsche Bank demonstrate clearly, what has been taking place in recent months – and why we are now seeing the reverse – is record prebuying and excess imports…

… which according to Deutsche Bank has led to precisely the opposite outcome than the one MSNBC and CNN have been blasting: there is excess inventory in the supply channel, enough in fact to last weeks if not months, assuming a full-blown collapse in global trade, which of course would never happen absent a covid-like shock.

Additionally, if and when retailers end up liquidating these billions in excess inventories they have accumulated just for this contingency, the outcome would be wildly deflationary, and hardly the inflationary shock so many „experts” predict (that’s the topic of another post, and we’ll get to it eventually).

Going back to the media’s favorite topic of dropping cargoes from China, it wasn’t just us that countered the popular narrative: so did Standard Chartered’s Steve Englander who wrote last week that „the lurid headlines on the drop in cargoes from China may be misleading.” That’s because as we noted above, the volume of laden cargo now being shipped from China to the US is down almost 50% versus mid-April 2025, but the mid-April level was very high, and while you will never hear this on CNN, the current level is about on a par with much of 2023. In fact, Englander said that „the current pace as the low end of normal over the last couple of years.” Again, hardly the apocalypse Kevin Plank’s favorite media body (we use the term loosely) portrays it to be.

There’s more: another thing you would never hear on MSNBC or CNN is that if the early-May pace of shipping to the US is maintained though end-June, the cumulative amount shipped in H1-2025 would be 18% higher than in H1-2023 and only 5% lower than in H1-2024. So far this year, the tonnage shipped to the US is 40% higher than in 2023 and 9% higher than in 2024. Indeed, as noted above, and as Englander observes, „US importers may have an inventory buffer until tariffs are negotiated downwards.”

Taking a step back, if only for the benefit of our CNN and MSNBC readers, the big picture is one that even if the US were to lose all Chinese imports – an outcome which nobody anticipates as it would destroy China’s economy as Reuters admitted last week – the outcome to the US would hardly be devastating. Yes, prices would rise, but overall the US would be able to handle it. Here, again, is Englander explaining why:

US imports from China are about 1.6% of US GDP in value terms. If inbound cargo stays at early-May levels, then H2-2025 imports will be 85% of 2023 levels (in volume terms) and 67% of 2024 levels. So the import volume shock would be 0.25% of GDP relative to 2023 and 0.5% relative to 2024. And keep in mind that there may be substitution from elsewhere. There may be temporary delays as US importers figure out the practicalities of dealing with the new tariffs, and shipping may be down temporarily because importers stocked up ahead of tariff implementation.

There is little precedent for this kind of tariff shock, but our judgement is that the US economy can handle it. We agree that disruption is likely from tariffs and that any benefits are uncertain, but we don’t think that the US economy will fall off a precipice because of a shock of this magnitude.

Remarkably, none of the so-called experts predicting doom and gloom in recent days spent even a minute to consider this eventuality. Which is also why the left’s attempt to spark widespread panic by focusing on Chinese imports had largely been a dud… and why it forced the media to escalate its claims to ever more ludicrous proportions, until we got the CNN story that there were „zero ships from China are bound for California’s top ports.”

And this is where we drew the line because it takes about a 10 second google search on any of the marine tracking websites such as Marine Traffic to find out this is total bullshit. And the fact that CNN didn’t even consider that not all of its readers are absolute idiots who would accept its lies with zero pushback, is what was most remarkable.

Below is a chart from Bloomberg showing all the Dry Cargo/Container ships that have recently left China, and are currently in the water, headed for Wast Coast ports.

Source: Bloomberg, IMO function

According to Bloomberg, there are no less than 52 cargo ships currently sailing from China to California and the West Coast, with the full list shown below.

Source: Bloomberg, IMO function

It goes without saying that 52 is quite different from the zero ships headed to the US, as CNN claims, and to put that number in context, here is what the average number of ships heading across from China to the US has been in 2025:

• January 59 ships
• February 56
• March 55
• April 55

And now May is 52. So that drop – from 55 to 52 – is supposed to be the looming covid-like apocalypse that the mainstream propaganda media is urging Americans to run to their local Walmart and stock up on several years worth of toilet paper?

But it gets worse for CNN, because while we can understand if they don’t have access to Bloomberg, or even google as a result of recent cuts in USAID funding, they could have just gone to the Port of Los Angeles website to look at the public Port Optimizer data which shows that contrary to fake narratives of collapsing global trade, the import volumes for the week of May 18-24 are up 19% from the previous week and up a whopping 56% from a year ago.

And another way of showing it: here is the total number of container ships sailing from China to the US (in TEUs). The number on May 11 is higher than where it was in 2024 and the same as May 2023. But you won’t hear any of that on CNN.

Instead, this is what you will hear on CNN:

„On Friday morning, West Coast port officials told CNN about a startling sight: Not a single cargo vessel had left China with goods for the two major West Coast ports in the past 12 hours. That hasn’t happened since the pandemic.”

Only this attempt to spark panic (while evoking the covid pandemic for obvious reasons) is also dead wrong: first, consider that there are currently 52 ships transiting the Pacific from China to SoCal, in line with historic numbers: the trip takes 20 days which means 2.6 ships sailing each day or one ship every 9 to 10 hours. So a 12 hour period is not unusual. And, as Sal Mercogliano points out, while no ships may have set sail for California on Friday, a quick look at Marine Traffic shows that three ships – Cosco Africa, Ever Safety and Ever Mild – are all leaving China for SoCal this weekend. So much for that „startling sight.”

6/The story said 41 ships were scheduled to sail, but on Friday it was zero. This does not mean the 41 are not sailing. A quick look @MarineTraffic finds COSCO AFRICA, EVER SAFETY and EVER MILD all leaving for SoCal this weekend. pic.twitter.com/t35J2I8XgL

— Sal Mercogliano (WGOW Shipping) (@mercoglianos) May 10, 2025

We could continue but you – unlike CNN – get the picture: transpacific trade may have slowed down, but it is nowhere near the full ground stop observed for a few weeks during covid, not even remotely close.

Meanwhile, the entire discussion about empty ports and empty shelves is completely moot because as Reuters reported even before the news of this weekend’s US-China trade talks breakthrough hit, „China-based shipping agents have resumed buying container space for goods headed for the United States after a series of U.S. tariff-induced cancellations, as Beijing and Washington head for trade talks in Switzerland.”

And here is Reuters confirming what we said several days ago: „Since late April, however, traders have stepped up buying of shipping capacity, locking in space from mid-May, according to two China-based executives with freight forwarding firms.”

Or precisely what we said a week ago.

Ships sailing from China to US hits 2 week high. But Long Beach was supposed to be a ghost port pic.twitter.com/T2Jdi8eJx1

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) May 7, 2025

And remarkably, and contrary to anything you may hear on CNN or MSNBC, shipping from China to the US is actually set for another surge! According to Dominic Desmarais, chief solutions officer at Liya Solutions which connects small and medium-sized companies with suppliers in China making everything from furniture to titanium products, prices could go up by $500 per container after May 15 as shipping activity recovers.

So much for CNN’s fake news.

We’ll leave readers with another far more critical discussion topic, namely whether tariffs lead to inflation, something about which we will have more to say in the coming days since this has become a focal point of much economic debate in recent months, not just in the political arena but also inside the Fed.

And while Fed Chair Powell appears to be very „confused” once again, claiming that tariffs are inflationary with the same erroneous conviction he previously argued „inflation was transitory” – we will instead point you to the recent work of Javier Bianchi, senior research economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, who thinks tariffs are not just a negative supply shock, but also a negative demand shock, and argues that the optimal monetary policy response to tariffs – which lead not to inflation but threaten recession – is to cut rates. For much more on this critical issue read „Under a stiff tariff, boosting the economy takes priority over inflation for a central bank”, something we are 100% certain neither CNN or MSNBC will ever do.