Weeks of labor unrest at the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach might have culminated in an eleventh hour deal to avoid a strike. But the delays they threatened gave a brief flashback to the logjam that prompted a redistribution of port traffic elsewhere in the country. Meanwhile, the very same Gulf of Mexico and East Coast ports that benefited from supply chain adjustments are now imperiled by the drought at the Panama Canal that has curtailed barge traffic dramatically in the past three weeks. After a year of relative respite, supply chain disruptions are on the rise again. And this time around, logistics users don’t have the same capacity to throw money at the problem or the consumer demand to justify it. 
The cascading events that sent import costs and lead times skyrocketing in 2020 and 2021 prompted retailers and other warehouse users to swell their inventories — only for customer demand to shift and for the cost of carrying excess inventory to rise sharply, University of Iowa professor of…  Read the full story here. | 
