Assorted Links Wednesday

US importers face even more extreme delays ahead as container capacity maxes out:

The number of container ships stuck at anchor off Los Angeles and Long Beach is down to around 20 per day, from 30 a few months ago. Does this mean the capacity crunch in the trans-Pacific market is finally easing? Absolutely not, warned Nerijus Poskus, vice president of global ocean at freight forwarder Flexport. “It’s not getting better. It’s getting worse,” he told American Shipper in an interview on Monday.

“What I’m seeing is unprecedented. We are seeing a tsunami of freight,” he reported.

“For the month of May, everything on the trans-Pacific is basically sold out. We had one client who needed something loaded in May that was extremely urgent and who was ready to pay $15,000 per container. I couldn’t get it loaded — and we are a growing company that ships a lot of TEUs [twenty-foot equivalent units]. Price doesn’t always even matter anymore.”

We seem to be entering a global version of The Beer Game.

Coming this summer: Gas stations running out of gas.

98% of the books that publishers released in 2020 sold fewer than 5k copies.

What’s behind the growth slump? Takeaways from census data:

Our past decade’s sluggish rate had similar beginnings in the long shadow of the Great Recession. The drawn-out recovery saw many young adults struggling to enter the job market, delaying marriage and starting a family. That dealt a blow to the nation’s birthrate. Then the pandemic hit last year and made matters worse.

Most Americans would take a pay cut to keep working from home.  "Some workers will go back to the office after the pandemic, but not enough to save central business districts from permanent drops in spending that will permanently remake American downtowns."