The demand became a lot more lopsided for several reasons:
* consumers were shifting spending from experiences that would've been COVID impacted (holiday travel, entertainment venues, restaurants) to online shopping
* industrial supply chains in Asia were the least impacted by COVID due to the relative lack of explosion in cases there compared to the rest of the world, so we are legitimately shipping more from there and exporting less
* a good chunk of the medical equipment that has been necessitated by COVID (e.g. masks) is made in Asia and that has made demand even more lopsided
* there was a ship backlog because COVID impacted how ships were getting unloaded, and at one point they weren't sending back ships with empty containers to reduce turnaround times, and now there are not enough containers in China and too many in the US.
Another poster said ships that would normally take empty containers back to China are now just unloading and leaving empty. If that's the case, it seems like it's trading short term gain for a longer term problem. Make them take the empties?
Nobody has to "make" anyone do anything in that situation. It's a classic supply/demand imbalance. Governments can't do anything here - even just getting them to pay attention to their own zoning rules required some random CEO in a boat talking to local workers then posting on Twitter. They aren't in a position to do anything better than the workers themselves can do.
Thanks a bunch, I think others have said it was the increased demand and I didn’t quite get it, or the scale of the lopsidedness it caused, until the way you described it!
* consumers were shifting spending from experiences that would've been COVID impacted (holiday travel, entertainment venues, restaurants) to online shopping
* industrial supply chains in Asia were the least impacted by COVID due to the relative lack of explosion in cases there compared to the rest of the world, so we are legitimately shipping more from there and exporting less
* a good chunk of the medical equipment that has been necessitated by COVID (e.g. masks) is made in Asia and that has made demand even more lopsided
* there was a ship backlog because COVID impacted how ships were getting unloaded, and at one point they weren't sending back ships with empty containers to reduce turnaround times, and now there are not enough containers in China and too many in the US.
Wendover Productions video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1JlYZQG3lI