The Panama Canal is getting a payout from its $5.4 billion widening project. A wider canal enabled ships, which, for example, can have a beam (width) of 49 meters – up from 32 meters and nearly three times the capacity – to transit the waterway. The number of ships transiting the canal is up 23%! Historically, bigger container vessels headed from Asia to ports like Charleston had to:
- unload in Panama and send the containers via rail to Colon, where they were put on another ship or
- go via the Suez Canal
Both routes – rail and Suez – are seeing a decline in volume.
On the oil front, Putin and the Saudi leaders met to discuss keeping oil production down – Russia is not a member of OPEC – with the goal of pushing world prices up.
Did you know that 80 of C.R. England Inc’s 8000 employees were unionized? I didn’t. Don’t worry; they have voted to decertify their union – International Brotherhood of Teamsters Local 705.