With Trump tariffs in the news, how’s container traffic at Port of Tacoma?
TACOMA – Depending on your social-media feed, shipping lanes and port traffic are a hot topic, with varying opinions on whether ports are ghost towns or still buzzing hubs of transport.
Los Angeles Port executive director Gene Seroka told CNBC this week that retailers have just a few weeks before feeling the effects of a trade slowdown from China over the 145% tariffs imposed by the Trump administration. He noted a “precipitous drop in volume with a number of major American retailers stopping all shipments from China based on the tariffs.”
Back in the Puget Sound, the Northwest Seaport Alliance, the marine-cargo operating partnership of the ports of Tacoma and Seattle, also has been getting its share of questions about traffic at the ports.
Kate Nolan is manager of communications and outreach for NWSA. She told The News Tribune in response to questions Tuesday evening via email, “We are not currently seeing a reduction, our numbers have actually been up.”
Nolan added that the ports “also are expecting 32 vessels across both Seattle and Tacoma this week and next, and very few, if any, of those sailings are expected to be voided.”
The full tariff effects have yet to be felt as administration officials say negotiations are continuing amid a 90-day pause on full implementation.
“We remain concerned about the impact of tariffs on our gateway, and are certainly hearing, especially from exporters, about canceled cargo and stopped orders,” Nolan wrote.
As far as those effects, she said, “it could be a few weeks and months before that is shown in the data we have available.”
Port representatives from Seattle and Tacoma underscored that concern at a business roundtable with U.S. Sen. Patty Murray, D-Washington, held earlier in April at Brown & Haley manufacturing in Tacoma. During that session, Tacoma port commission president and Northwest Seaport Alliance co-chair John McCarthy said they were already “starting to see people not having customers to sell.”
“We are starting to hear stories of shippers wanting their cargo back,” he added at that time.
Port of Seattle commissioner Ryan Calkins told Seattle’s KING 5 TV this week, “The last forecast I saw was forecasting out over the next three months, and each month was forecasted to be down around 25% per month.”
A report from Apollo Global Management’s chief economist in late April created a potential economic slowdown timeline tied to the shipping, trucking and retail industry, pointing to a recession this summer.
Under the scenario, it predicts container ships coming to U.S. ports stopping sometime in May, affecting trucking demand later that month, with layoffs in trucking and retail potentially emerging in late May/early June.
The Economic Alliance of Snohomish County on Tuesday hosted a recorded meeting about the effect of tariffs on Washington businesses with various business/trade officials. When asked about the current state of shipments at the ports, Port of Tacoma commissioner and NWSA managing member Kristin Ang said, “We are very much alive,” but shared concerns about the months ahead.
“We can’t predict all the way through May, but we can see that some of (the ships) are coming with some Chinese exports, but some have been canceled,” she said. “There has been some challenges, and we did anticipate, even at the beginning of year, that we would see a likely decline in the second half of the year.”
She noted, “While impacts vary by sector, the common thread is disruption. Industries rely on a resilient, responsive and reliable supply chain, and that is currently being disrupted and causing all this headache, challenges and costs for everyone involved.”