Featured Headlines:

• Apparently, Herbert Hoover is back in fashion, which is terrific news for vacuum jokes and somewhat less encouraging for international trade with the United States.
• Through Executive Order 14411 (to say nothing of 301, 232, and 338), the White House continues to build its protectionist wall around American industry. Meanwhile, CBP is quietly working on the plumbing required to enforce it, exploring dramatically greater visibility into who made an imported product, where it came from, what foreign Customs were told about it, and where its raw materials originated.
• Nothing changes tomorrow. CBP’s new Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking is essentially a 64-question fishing expedition before formal regulations are written. But the direction of travel is unmistakable: more supply-chain parties identified, more foreign documentation, earlier filing, more reconciliation of foreign and U.S. data, and potentially AI-enabled tracing deep into production networks.
• Look, we know that strict enforcement is not a tariff, but it is protectionism, plain and simple.
• This all comes as brokers are already being pushed toward substantially greater importer validation. Our own new (perfect!) procedures now emphasize a simple operational standard: verify, corroborate, document and escalate, while specifically avoiding turning the Customs broker into a gumshoed private investigator.
• There is a certain irony here. We are erecting an increasingly sophisticated enforcement machine to protect American manufacturing without articulating an equally sophisticated plan to reinvent American manufacturing. Where is the corresponding national strategy for robotics, additive manufacturing, AI-driven production, advanced materials and highly automated factories?
• Hoover learned the harder lesson. Smoot-Hawley raised tariffs to historic levels (well, at least at that time) in an attempt to protect domestic producers. Other countries retaliated, international trade seized up, and American exporters became collateral damage. The Senate’s historical account is unusually undiplomatic: “the high tariff proved to be a disaster.”
• Tariffs can protect a factory. They cannot invent the next factory. And requiring importers to provide increasingly forensic evidence about everything entering America may make protectionism more enforceable, but it does not make it an industrial policy.
• The Hoover Administration at least had the decency to leave us a vacuum. Apparently, we kept ALL the attachments.
• And yes, before somebody emails us: Herbert Hoover had absolutely nothing to do with the Hoover vacuum cleaner. Wrong Hoover, admittedly. But Smoot-Hawley still sucked.

• Ocean carriers apparently aren’t satisfied with owning the ships anymore. Increasingly, they’re buying the docks too, with carrier-owned terminals now handling roughly 50% of major operators’ throughput and the deal count continuing to climb.
• The strategy makes plenty of sense. Vertical integration can cut costs, improve efficiency and turn an expense into another source of revenue. And after several extraordinarily profitable years, the carriers have plenty of cash to move their battleships around the board.
• History does offer a small warning before everybody starts buying Boardwalk. Industries have a habit of vertically integrating when times are good, only to discover that yesterday’s strategic asset has become tomorrow’s “non-core business” when conditions change.
• The interesting question is whether terminals are different. If carriers now view port infrastructure as fundamental to controlling their networks, these purchases may prove considerably stickier than previous rounds of vertical integration.
• There is also a shipper angle to Portopoly. Every terminal or chunk of capacity that moves under carrier control means a little less independent capacity in the marketplace. When networks tighten, fewer independent options can mean less leverage for everybody else at the table. Think of ports as those ugly red hotels.
• For now, the Big Five have the cash and scale to keep buying property. The question is how much of the board they ultimately want to own, and whether controlling more squares proves more valuable than simply collecting the freight.
• Just remember: in Portopoly, we’re pretty sure the shipper is the guy paying the rent.

• Global port congestion has quietly removed an extraordinary amount of vessel capacity from the market. Sea-Intelligence estimates 6.6% of the global fleet, roughly 2.3 million TEU, is effectively tied up by delays, up from 5% in June and about triple pre-pandemic levels.
• The pain is real. Schedule reliability fell to 56.4% in July, with late vessels averaging nearly a week behind schedule. Asia has been the principal culprit, as typhoons collided with already crowded terminals and all 14 major Asian ports tracked by Sea-Intelligence deteriorated during the month.
• But there is an awkward silver lining for ocean carriers: congestion is temporarily absorbing ships the market may soon have trouble absorbing itself. And when the congestion clears, carriers will still have an enormous orderbook arriving while a return to the Suez Canal would shorten Asia-Europe voyages and release even more effective capacity.
• For once, congestion isn’t merely the disease. It may also be the medicine.

When Ningbo blows and Shanghai rains,
The whole world feels supply-chain pains.

A typhoon lands, the vessels wait,
And Rotterdam starts running late.

Chicago sneezes. Hamburg cries.
A buyer in Baltimore asks “why?!”

The Panama Canal is open wide,
But somehow nothing moves inside.

For globalization’s dirty secret, you see,
Is frightening in its simplicity:

Two ports. Two cities. One-tenth of the boxes.
And Mother Nature knows exactly where the dock is.

• The U.S. and Iran have moved beyond threats and into direct military exchanges around the Strait of Hormuz, with Washington unveiling what amounts to a “tanker for tanker” policy. This is not generally considered a best practice in supply-chain management.
• Tuesday’s U.S. strikes reportedly hit roughly 100 Iranian targets, including air defenses, radar, minelaying equipment, communications facilities, anti-ship missile and drone launchers, plus two Iranian government tankers anchored off the coast.
• Iran responded with roughly 25 ballistic missiles and two dozen drones aimed at U.S. bases in Bahrain, Kuwait, and Erbil. Several missiles and drones targeting commercial traffic were reportedly intercepted.
• And yet, somehow, Hormuz kept Hormuzing. Roughly 40 vessels transited the strait Tuesday, moving millions of barrels of oil through a waterway surrounded by missiles, drones, warships, and people presumably reconsidering their career choices.
• That may be the most important point. The question is no longer simply whether Hormuz is open. It is what price shipowners, charterers, insurers, crews, and cargo interests demand to keep treating it as open.
• The strait already requires regular minesweeping, or “lawn mowing,” to remain safely navigable. When the lawn mower comes with naval escorts, the neighborhood has officially deteriorated.
• There is also an obscure but potentially enormous problem brewing in the freight markets. How do you price a tanker voyage when the benchmarks, especially risk assessments, are shifting almost by the hour? If insurers won’t play even for big pay, many owners will simply say, “No way!”
• So, amazingly, the ships are still sailing. The missiles are flying. The oil is flowing. And the freight market hasn’t quite decided how to price Armageddon.

• The Logbook Police Are Finally Reading the Logs
  • Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and apparently one of them was being driven by a guy whose electronic logbook wasn’t quite telling the truth. FMCSA has been on a remarkable ELD housecleaning spree, removing more than 90 electronic logging devices since January 2025 for failing to meet federal requirements.
  • The underlying weakness is rather extraordinary: ELD manufacturers self-certify that their devices comply with FMCSA standards. The agency is now testing that proposition rather more aggressively, removing devices that fail its technical requirements and forcing fleets to replace them.
  • The point of ELDs was to make hours-of-service records more accurate and harder to manipulate, helping ensure drivers actually get federally required rest. Or, as Frost almost certainly did not say: Good logs make good truckers.
  • And this is no poetic technicality. Once FMCSA revokes a device, carriers generally get 60 days to replace it, using paper logs or approved logging software in the meantime. Keep using the revoked device after the deadline and the driver can be placed out of service. Truck parked. Freight stuck. And miles to go before we sleep.
  • The woods are lovely, dark and deep. The compliance department, considerably less so.

• East Coast Ports Are Having a Moment, and Not the Good Kind
  • Spot drayage rates at several East and Gulf Coast ports are climbing sharply, with Norfolk reportedly up 23% and Savannah up 19% year-over-year.
  • Import volumes aren’t helping. Savannah reportedly logged 1,000 to 1,500 additional daily truck transactions in late July versus June, which is a fairly effective way to turn a busy port into a parking lot with cranes.
  • Chassis are getting harder to find as well, with longer street dwells and more equipment stuck out of service. That is pushing some shippers toward carriers with their own chassis rather than rolling the dice on increasingly stressed shared pools.
  • And there is a new wrinkle in carrier selection. In May, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II that freight brokers can face state negligent-selection claims when they allegedly choose unsafe motor carriers. Translation: “But they were the cheapest guy on DAT” is not much of a legal strategy.
  • That ruling should put even more emphasis on carrier vetting at exactly the moment capacity is tightening. Fewer acceptable carriers, fewer available chassis, more boxes and higher rates are not exactly the ingredients for a soothing afternoon at the port.
  • The boxes keep coming, the chassis do stray, the rates go up. We dray, and we pray.