April 2013 Sea Container Counts Are Still Contracting
Econintersect LLC | May 16, 2013 06:11AM ET
For the second month in a row, both import and export container counts are contracting year-over-year – comparing same months in 2012 and 2013.
- Economically intuitive imports however are “less bad” (but are still growing year-to-date);
- exports are also “less bad” in April but continues to contract year-to-date.
For the month of April 2013, the economically intuitive imports are down 17.2% (after being up a massive 34.4% in February and down 17.2% in March) year-over-year, and up 16.1% month-over-month. There is a direct linkage between imports and USA economic activity – and growth in imports foretells real economic growth. Imports are on a negative growth trend line.
Exports (which are an indicator of competitiveness and global economic growth) are down 3.3% year-over-year (versus last month’s -6.9%) – and up 3.7% month-over-month. Exports are on a negative growth trend line.
There is reasonable correlation between the container counts and the US Census historically is a recession marker, as consumers and businesses start to hunker down. Main Street and Wall Street are not necessarily in phase and imports can reflect the direction for Main Street when Wall Street may be saying something different. During some recessions, consumers and businesses hunkered down before the Wall Street recession hit – and in the 2007 recession the contraction began 10 months into the recession.
Above graph with current data:
Imports of Goods and Services
Econintersect
determines the month-over-month change by subtracting the current month’s year-over-year change from the previous month’s year-over-year change. This is the best of the bad options available to determine month-over-month trends – as the preferred methodology would be to use multi-year data (but the New Normal effects and the Great Recession distort historical data).
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