OUT OF SPACE
According to press reports, the yards and warehouses were already filled with empties. Moreover, trucks bearing fresh empties could not unload them and thus could not take on new containers.
And so, the cargoes sit and wait. Partial solutions – stacking the empties higher, for example – can go only so far. Over a longer period, new docks and rail lines can be built.
But all of that takes time, land (which is not easy to find, it turns out), and heavy equipment, which itself must come from somewhere, possibly by ship.
A supply chain is an entire ecology, a biophysical entity. It requires all of its parts to function smoothly all of the time. Failures are not isolated to one segment, nor can they be fixed with a simple increase in prices or fees, or by some rapid change in techniques.
Instead, they cascade through a system that was built in a specific way; a breakdown in one part can become a general one.
In his remarkable 2011 book, The Global Minotaur, the economist (and future Greek finance minister) Yanis Varoufakis compared the United States to the mythical monster that lived in a labyrinth from which nothing that entered could escape.
For 40 years, the US economy has taken in the consumption goods produced by Japan, South Korea, China and others. To sustain the insatiable Minotaur, the world built a global labyrinth of ports, ships, more ports, warehouses, storage yards, roads and rails.
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