America’s Supply Chain Collides With California’s Nimbyism — Virginia Postrel
Ryan Petersen, the chief executive of logistics company Flexport, recently rented a boat to get a close look at what was happening at the port of Long Beach, California. He then took to Twitter to report what he’d learned about why two of the nation’s largest ports — Long Beach and Los Angeles — have come to a virtual standstill.
“In a full 3 hour loop through the port complex, passing every single terminal, we saw less than a dozen containers get unloaded,” he wrote. There were plenty of cranes, he observed, but nearly every spot holding containers was filled. With empties clogging the available space, new containers carrying goods from sea or land had nowhere to go. The result was a supply-chain logjam on an epic scale.
It turned out that the main problem wasn’t an absolute space constraint but a local zoning regulation. Long Beach prohibits companies from stacking offloaded containers more than two high. The law is not a safety regulation but an aesthetic one: City officials decided that stacks of containers more than 8 feet high were too ugly to tolerate. So the voters in Long Beach gained a modest improvement in the view while the entire national — indeed global — economy suffered from less efficient shipping.
(Bloomberg Opinion) -- Read the whole thing.
Democrats Should Be Thanking Sinema and Manchin — Karl W. Smith
Are We Heading for a Repeat of the 2018 Stocks Selloff? — John Authers
The U.S. Should Rethink Public-Service Loan Forgiveness — Bloomberg’s editorial board
Billionaire Issa Brothers Face $1 Billion Asda Setback — Andrea Felsted
To Tax Billionaires, Democrats Should Keep It Simple — Alexis Leondis
Airlines Are Getting Ready to Fly Into an Uncertain Future — David Fickling
Three Reasons Inflation Isn’t Here to Stay — Tyler Cowen
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Brooke Sample is an editor for Bloomberg Opinion. She was previously an editor at Euromoney Institutional Investor.
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