They are so easily impressed. Their deep in-depth "sniffing" involves going to the Port of Long Beach's website and pulling statistics out. That's some rock-solid Will Pitt level journalism. From the site (
http://www.polb.com/economics/stats/latest_teus.asp):
September Fiscal Year to Date***
2008** 2007 % Change 2008** 2007 % Change
LOADED INBOUND 279,137 331,507 -15.80% 3,337,717 3,742,132 -10.80%
LOADED OUTBOUND 129,630 134,842 -3.90% 1,782,298 1,471,508 21.10%
EMPTIES 146,070 187,760 -22.20% 1,616,741 2,148,241 -24.70%
TOTAL(T.E.U.) 554,837 654,109 -15.20% 6,736,756 7,361,881 -8.50%
So the net impact on cargo for loaded containers is 5,120,015 (est) TEU's this year versus 5,213,640 last year. A change of less than 2% that indicates that our trade imbalance may be shifting to a more favorable position. Can't believe that the sky isn't falling on that.
FYI, since it's rather obscure, a TEU is a 20 foot equivalent unit. It's a "unit" to measure containership cargo capacity with a standard TEU being a twenty foot ISO container.