Shipping prices didn’t just go up because of energy prices increases. Not many ocean going vessels run on Natural Gas and the price they pay for the fuel oil is tiny compared to the value of the products carried.
International shipping prices went nuts because of a lack of shipping containers.
Shipping containers were in short supply because of congestion in the ports.
Congestion in the ports was mostly caused by COVID related labor shortage
The labor shortages were the result of strict lockdown rules in Democrat states and because of independent truckers being PAID by the freaking government to stay home.
Before all this Covid crap, shipping containers routinely cycled between continents 9 or 10 times per year. With the covid congestion, this dropped to 3-4 times per year. So, BOOM! In a very short time period, we had a 60-70% reduction in the apparent # of containers.
It got ridiculous in mid-summer. You couldn’t find a container to come from Japan to the US for ANY price. We paid $1.5M for 30 containers! Things have calmed down quite a bit since then. But, we still don’t have enough truckers.
(From the OP):" According to the Cass Corp Freight Index, the total spent in December on shipping goods to their customers in the US spiked by 43.6% from December 2020 to December 2021.
Not surprising since energy prices over the past year have soared by almost 50%."
"But at the same time, the Baltic Dry index (The Baltic Dry Index (BDI) is a shipping and trade index created by the London-based Baltic Exchange.
It measures changes in the cost of transporting various raw materials, such as coal and steel) is crashing thanks to FEAR created by Omicron."
SomeCallMeTim :" International shipping prices went nuts because of a lack of shipping containers.
Shipping containers were in short supply because of congestion in the ports.
Congestion in the ports was mostly caused by COVID related labor shortage"
"The labor shortages were the result of strict lockdown rules in Democrat states and because of independent truckers being PAID by the freaking government to stay home."
"Before all this Covid crap, shipping containers routinely cycled between continents 9 or 10 times per year. With the covid congestion, this dropped to 3-4 times per year.
So, BOOM! In a very short time period, we had a 60-70% reduction in the apparent # of containers."
One article I read pushed the problem even further into the chain. They were writing that moving stuff from the port to the distribution warehouse was another bottleneck because those facilities were not 24/7 AND they were having a tough time getting people to move the contents from the unloaded containers to the trucks that would take them to the regional distribution site.
I recall seeing sat photos from Shanghai back in 2020 that showed tens of thousands of containers sitting on the side of rail lines and stacked up around ports. This was because the production was so slow in China, the boxes were not being filled and sent back to idle ports.
It appears we are about to enter that portion of the cycle again—with a couple major ports in China shutting down.
This has been an interesting education on how stuff works in the world.