Imports and exports continued their downward trend in November:
Imports of consumer goods are down $23 billion since the March peak. Imports from China are down $11 billion. This is yet another example of the general decline of economic activity over the past six months or so.
Can confirm. The intermodal railroad ramp I work at gets considerable business from international traffic. Our numbers have been abysmal for over a month. It was like rail traffic to and from the ports just dropped off a cliff in November. It's almost eerie how slow we are right now.
I know inventories of durable goods were at an all time high last year as those terrible port bottlenecks started clearing. I think a lot of retailers are trying to draw down those inventories -- I know a friend who got a great deal on a fancy LG kitchen appliance suite recently -- and so aren't placing a lot of new orders. Plus, as Kevin suggests, big ticket items that people often purchase using credit or payment plans are now more expensive due to interest rate hikes, so that's certainly playing a role, too.
If TimeSeriesOfMoney(Chart)
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My wife made crab cakes for New Years. It was from a can that we had laying around for years.
So then yesterday she was at the grocery and looked at resupplying our depleted inventory.
$45 dollars for a 1 pound can of crab meat.
I might not ever eat crab again.
Probably just as well. Among the hits for “crab fishery closure”
https://www.adn.com/business-economy/2022/10/18/were-facing-an-industrys-extinction-bering-sea-crab-closures-mean-potentially-massive-losses/
and stocks are dropping...
OF course they've been swinging up and down quite a bit for a while--where bad news is good news if it gets the Fed to ease rates and good news is bad because it might cause the Fed to raise rates...