Morning Brew Daily
Shipping Industry's Warning on Supply Chains & ‘60 Minutes’ vs. Paramount
Tue, 29 Apr 2025
Episode 571: Neal and Toby discuss what some analysts believe is another ‘covid-like’ shipping crisis that is set to impact stores across the US amid the US-China trade war. Then, the legendary news program ‘60 Minutes’ publicly criticizes its owner Paramount for creating an environment that forced out its long-time producer. Also, the Washington Commanders finally ink a new billion-dollar deal to build a brand new stadium in DC. Meanwhile, Toby examines the rising interest of the mobile home business. Subscribe to Morning Brew Daily for more of the news you need to start your day. Share the show with a friend, and leave us a review on your favorite podcast app. Visit https://planetoat.com/ to learn more! Vote for us! https://shortyawards.com/17th/morning-brew-daily-show Listen to Morning Brew Daily Here: https://link.chtbl.com/MBD Watch Morning Brew Daily Here: https://www.youtube.com/@MorningBrewDailyShow 00:00: Vote for MBD in the Shorty Awards! 3:40 - Shipping Woes 8:10 - 60 Minutes vs Paramount 13:00 - Commanders New Stadium 18:40 - Toby's Trends: Mobile Homes 22:00 - Headlines Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What are the current shipping woes affecting the U.S.?
I will tell you what, a seven-hour transatlantic flight post-marathon leads to soreness levels I have never experienced. But the experience itself, awesome. I ran... the New York Marathon last year, and the fans in London might be even rowdier, maybe because they are a couple pints deep by that point, more so than their American counterparts. Also, way more costumed runners.
I saw a guy dressed as Big Ben, Wonder Woman, a shark, the king, the queen, and I was in a corral with a guy wearing a full three-piece Peaky Blinders-esque suit, and all he said to me was, gonna be a hot one out there. He beat me, by the way. He passed me at like mile 22. I was like, oh no. But yes, great time. Loved every step, even if I didn't run it as fast as I wanted to.
On that note of competition, though, I do hear that MBD is up for a little award.
We are, which is pretty cool. We are a finalist in the business podcast category of the Shorty Awards, which is like the Oscars, but a little more prestigious.
Neil is right. They are kind of like the Oscars, but for digital and social media content and brands. I didn't win a medal over in London, but you can help us and our whole team win some hardware by heading to vote at the link in the podcast description. Voting closes tomorrow night at 8 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, not London time, Eastern Standard.
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Chapter 2: What controversy is surrounding 60 Minutes and Paramount?
So send this to your friends, your family, to your shorty, and let's go win MBD a shorty award. And now a word from our sponsor, Planet Oat. Neil, you ever use one of those pens that just glides across the page?
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Chapter 3: What are the plans for the Washington Commanders' new stadium?
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Remember during the early days of COVID when you'd go to a store and find pretty much nothing you needed on the shelves? A number of prominent economists and freight experts have come out in recent days saying we're headed for a similar scenario in a matter of weeks if the U.S. 's 145% tariffs on Chinese goods remain in effect.
That's because traffic across the Pacific has become quiet, too quiet. Since President Trump slapped massive tariffs on China in early April, cargo shipments have plunged by 60 percent, according to logistics company Flexport. Meanwhile, the number of so-called blank sailings or canceled voyages has surged.
In April, there were about 80 canceled sailings from China to the U.S., which is 60% more than any month during the COVID pandemic, logistics exec John McCown said. Speaking of COVID, some experts say we could see a supply shock on the same order as the pandemic.
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Chapter 4: How is the mobile home business trending?
In an ominous and viral research note, you don't really say viral next to a research note a lot, but Apollo's chief economist, Torsten Slocke, wrote that, quote, container traffic from China to the U.S. is collapsing. The consequence will be empty shelves in U.S. stores in a few weeks.
and COVID-like shortages for consumers and for firms using Chinese products as intermediate goods, and the effects could spill into the broader economy. Slock warned of major layoffs in trucking, logistics, and retail, meaning the downside risks to the economy are significant.
Toby, for many Americans, the trade war feels pretty abstract for now, but if you listen to the people who work in freight and logistics, it could become real in just a few weeks.
Yeah, it's getting real quiet on the port front on ships coming in from China to the US. And the reason why these effects aren't going to be manifested necessarily is a lot of companies have been stocking up. They kind of saw this coming. So they've been building up inventories. But when
Chapter 5: What are the latest headlines impacting our daily lives?
you really might start to feel it is when they start needing to restock ahead of the busy holiday shopping season. But empty shelves is something that Americans are not necessarily used to seeing outside of COVID, outside of these supply chain snarls. So it is definitely why this research note caused so many alarm bells to go off because
The words American empty shelves just don't even really jive with each other. And the issue is that there's not necessarily a non-rocky path forward because if you start to relieve these tariffs and if all these goods start to pour into the U.S., the ports can't sustain that either. So it's not necessarily like as soon as the tariffs are off, suddenly these supply chain issues are sorted out.
It's going to get worse before it gets better.
They're built to handle more stable flows rather than this dramatic up and down, which we're seeing now. And the timing of this could not be any worse because we are coming up on the peak shipping season for back to school and the holidays. I mean, Gary Cohn went on the Sunday shows on Sunday morning. He is the former Trump economic advisor from the first term, and he explained that
this whole thing of getting goods from China to the U.S. is a very long process. It takes something like eight weeks to go from a factory in Shenzhen onto a ship in Shanghai. And then you go to the port of Long Beach and then it goes into a truck and then it goes to another warehouse and then it goes finally to the retail store. That is a very long process. And
And so they're ordering holiday goods in the next few weeks and months. And if they don't order them, then that means shortages come at the time when everybody's shopping.
And then this viral deck from Apollo economist Slock also pointed out other areas of weakness in the U.S. economy. He looked at earnings revisions, which have been coming in fast and hot, inbound tourism, which is decreasing, and then consumer confidence also tanking. So it wasn't just shipping, although he was looking very deeply into that. This guy put a lot of effort into this.
He was looking at satellite images of US trade in the South China Sea, just seeing what ships are leaving and what ships are coming in. And that's where he got a lot of data from as well. So again, you framed this by saying, what are the tangible impacts of the trade war? It's looking like they are finally being felt
And then eventually will manifest in empty shelves, potentially, if this isn't worked out before.
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