Commentary

It is a tale of two ports, but it’s a story with enormous implications for how U.S. trade will move for decades to come.

Whether you are looking at a business or a government, there usually is no clearer evidence of priorities than a budget.

The release of the Obama administration 2012 budget this week offers a revealing snapshot of the state of East Coast preparedness – or lack thereof - for the scheduled 2014 expansion of the Pana

Two U.S.

I am well aware that Washington and the American public have been focused on recovering from the deep recession.

’Tis the season. No, not that season, the container shipping service contract season!

Before the 10-day West Coast port shutdown nearly a decade ago and the various disruptions at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach that followed between 2004 and 2007, few thought about East Coast-

Q: Some months ago, our company as a broker arranged transportation of a shipment of alcoholic beverages.

The Danish financial newspaper Borsen reported this month that Maersk Line and logistics operator Kuehne + Nagel signed an agreement with the sort of scale bound to make waves around the world when it

In his Rational Irrationality blog, John Cassidy of The New Yorker tries to make

One could be excused for thinking the start of 2011 provides an opportunity to sit back and reflect upon another exhaustive and challenging year for those working in the shipping industry.

It may be new information for some reading this column that Houston is the largest port in the U.S., and has been for the past 14 years.

One of the storied exchanges in American journalism took place in the New York Sun in September 1897 when eight-year-old Virginia O’Hanlon sought the truth about Santa Claus.

The history of shipping, in whatever form of transportation you might mention, has been all about speeding things up.

Q: As I’m sure you’re aware, the National Classification Board has approved a change in the classification of clothing from class 100 to a range of classes, from 70 to 400, based on densit

Fresh off its lengthy and secret study of container availability, the Federal Maritime Commission has a new investigative target in mind: slow-steaming carriers.

We tend to look at the history of U.S.

Thanks to the recession, transloading is rapidly evolving from a tactic shippers used to avoid high rail rates for intact containers into a strategic tool in importers’ supply chains.

Q: We’re a maritime freight forwarder that does business with a client who imports from Hong Kong under credit arrangements.

Welcome to the first year of the second decade of the 21st century. Happy New Year to you all.

On Jan.

To say infrastructure and trade have never been as prominent in a presidential State of the Union address as they were last week would be an understatement.

We live in a world of immediacy. We want our news now. The Internet delivers. Shippers want their goods now.

Under normal circumstances, the last three months of any year follow a predictable pattern: the buildup to a peak, followed by the steady slide back to a quiet holiday period.

Q: I enjoy reading your columns, but I have a question about the one published in the Nov. 22, 2010, issue, in answer to the maritime freight forwarder who wrote about the Aug.

The lame-duck session of the 111th Congress produced a number of remarkable pieces of legislation, including a new food safety law that will impact international shippers.

As the smoke clears from the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, it’s possible to start drawing conclusions about how the transportation environment has changed.

Anyone who reads indictments of organized-crime figures must wonder: Where do these guys get their nicknames?

Cities and towns along the northern U.S. border have long drawn Canadian shoppers seeking lower-priced U.S. goods. Now Canadians are shopping for companies.

If 2009 was the year of the economic disaster and 2010 was the year of recovery and conflict, what will the ocean shipping industry call 2011 a year from now?

Q: A shipment is to go from us to the customer of our customer, with a 3PL doing the actual carrier routing. Our terms of sale for any and all such shipments are f.o.b. origin, freight collect.

A year ago, a dark cloud was descending on the trans-Pacific shipping market as the realization set in among shippers that capacity was disappearing rapidly and the traditional rules of the game for g

Differential calculus defines an inflection point as a point on a curve where the curvature changes sign.

Driven by a late-year crest of exports, California’s undermined trade competitiveness, amplified by the recession, ended in 2010.

As we launch into 2011, shippers and carriers face twin challenges that are not merely contradictory but also, it turns out, plainly paradoxical.

As new chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, Rep.

For America and Americans, the future has always been about the hope of a better tomorrow, which means two things: solving today’s problems and articulating a vision for tomorrow.

“Although everyone seems to agree conditions are improving, it’s difficult to forecast a continuous upward trend.”

A year ago in this space we noted the major question hanging over the world of trade and transportation was capacity — the availability of space on ships, trucks and aircraft.

An anti-terrorism campaign along interstate highways may have inspired the letter bombs sent to Maryland's governor and transportation secretary.