“Ship Happens”: The pandemic’s nerd celebrities
“Ship Happens: The Miniseries” is a podcast that would not exist if not for the pandemic, which prompted consumers to begin ordering couches and computer screens so voraciously that the world’s factories and ports could not keep up.
But as furniture delays and car shortages began to dominate the headlines last year, Eytan Buchman and his colleagues at Freightos, a global shipping platform, saw an opportunity.
“You never really pay attention to something until it’s broken,” said Buchman, chief marketing officer at the company. “Part of it was giddiness that, hey, people care.”
Freightos, which started its podcast about supply chains in November, is among a spate of data providers whose wonks and once esoteric offerings have been catapulted into the spotlight by a pandemic that has rewritten the rules of global commerce and economics.
Not that Buchman was happy that everything felt broken. But he saw that Freightos could help. He and his colleagues had a wealth of shipping data and expertise at their disposal, and they began to think of ways to share it with the world, producing an index of ocean container travel times, releasing the audio program and ramping up media appearances.
What could have been a short moment of prominence has lasted well into 2022. Nothing — not shipping routes, not consumer spending, not the labor market and definitely not inflation — seems to be behaving the way it did before the coronavirus struck in early 2020.
Researchers and policymakers are flying blind, and they and ordinary people are turning to experts like Buchman as they try to sketch out a new map of a changed economic landscape.
“A very select circle of enlightened individuals found supply chains interesting before, but it was not a widely shared passion,” said Phil Levy, chief economist at Flexport, a freight forwarding and customs brokerage company — displaying the sort of supply chain deadpan that bigger audiences, relatively speaking, are now enjoying.
According to a profile kept by Bloomberg, Levy has racked up 26 unique media mentions so far this year, after 26 in all of 2021 and 15 in 2020.
Suddenly, every economist and economics writer seems to be a trade analyst, trying to suss out what might happen to supplies and prices.
“Normally, when one does forecasting, you look at past experiences,” Levy said. “That changed with the pandemic.”
The revolution started in the toilet paper aisle. At the onset of the pandemic, consumers abruptly started to shop differently. Nobody needed coffee to go or manicures; everyone wanted new home- office furniture.
As the government sent out repeated stimulus checks and offered more generous unemployment insurance and families spent more time at home, Americans spent the money on goods rather than the services that consumed a big chunk of their budgets before the pandemic. Even as the aid has faded and
business has returned to something approaching normal, demand for things has remained unusually strong.
The world’s ships, ports and factories fell behind early in the pandemic, and they have been unable to fully catch up. The situation has only been intensified by unanticipated disruptions like a giant cargo ship’s getting stuck in the Suez Canal. The Ever Given spent six immobile days, drawing global attention to the precariousness of supply chains and ocean commerce — and increasing demand for experts who could explain it.
“That was a turning point in freight fame,” Buchman recalled fondly.
Ever Given stands as a symbol of a larger phenomenon in the pandemic economy: Disruptions keep surfacing, throwing an already struggling system even further out of whack.
The mismatch between supply and demand has stoked inflation, which has surprised policymakers because it has been so rapid and because it has proved long- lasting.
And the upheaval extends beyond the world of shipping.
Companies cannot find enough workers, in part because the pandemic appears to have accelerated a demographic shift. Baby boomers, who were entering retirement age, left the labor market in large numbers — and it is unclear if they will return. Parents coping with unpredictable child care also left the workforce. Employers are grappling with the possibility that workers are in the midst of a “Great Resignation,” possibly encouraged by savings amassed during the pandemic. The labor market shortages have given them a chance to ask for higher pay and better workplace conditions.
As the coronavirus era enters its third year, the economic mysteries are many: Will those workers come back? Will America’s appetite for new couches ever be sated? Is there any price that consumers will not pay for cars?
Fiona Greig doesn’t know all of the answers. But she has data that might allow her — and others — to come closer than they otherwise would.
“I’m now receiving inbound requests from asset managers in Germany, from all walks — our own Federal Reserve Bank, the White House, etc.,” said Greig, director of consumer research and co- president at the Jpmorgan Chase Institute.
Early in the pandemic, the institute focused on one metric that was of great interest to a lot of people: what people could spend. The now widely cited graphic uses Chase data to show how much cash households in different income bands have in their checking accounts in near real time, and policymakers and Wall Street econometricians alike have been using it to gauge the spending power of different groups of consumers.
“We now have a ‘ request data’ button, and people are requesting it from all quarters,” Greig said.
Supply chains remain a mess. Labor shortages have shown no clear sign of fading, and policymakers are waiting eagerly for signs that inflation is cooling down.
Port stoppages and delays have shown signs of easing, but the war in Ukraine is pushing up oil and other commodity prices.
It is also disrupting air transport, as planes fly around Russian airspace and carry lighter cargoes to make the longer trip more affordable, and it threatens to upend global food supplies, especially grains.
Buchman said it could take six months to a year for supply chains to get back to any kind of normal — “Ship Happens” isn’t wrapping up just yet.
In fact, it is likely that even once capacity begins to recover, ship will still be happening.
Companies may be investing so much in new vessels and planes that the world ends up in a new era of oversupply, Buchman said. If so, listeners may just need a podcast for that.