(Zero Hedge)—Enough Democrats caved in overnight to pass a key GOP funding bill as the federal government shutdown reached its record 40th day. There’s still significant work ahead to fully reopen the government, but this marks very solid progress. On the international front, progress is also evident, with a new report indicating that the U.S. and China have suspended port fees and reciprocal probes amid easing trade tensions.
Bloomberg reports that the Trump administration paused its probe into China’s shipbuilding industry for one year, prompting Beijing to suspend its retaliatory investigation and delay planned port fees on U.S. vessels. Both trade concessions were as expected, following breakthrough trade talks between President Trump and President Xi on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit last month in South Korea.
The U.S. Trade Representative stated that negotiations with China will proceed on the issues raised by the probe. The mutual suspensions relieve pressure on global shipping markets after tit-for-tat moves by both economic superpowers had threatened to snarl maritime trade routes and drive up freight costs if reciprocal port fees had taken effect.
“As long as the suspension remains, the potential risk to upend global shipping remains,” said Jayendu Krishna, a director at Drewry Maritime Services.
New data from Goldman analysts led by Jordan Alliger shows continued weakness in China-to-U.S. trade flows, with loaded vessels down for a fourth straight week (-10% WoW, -35% YoY) through October 30.
Alliger noted that China-to-U.S. trade flows will experience a brief improvement in mid-November (+6% YoY) before another steep drop (-30% YoY) by month’s end.
“Full ramifications from the recent tariff-related implementations and magnitudes have yet to play out – but the next few weeks could continue to illustrate shipper reactions as a potentially wait-and-see mode after the large pull forward over the summer,” the analyst said.
Key highlights from the report:
- China freight flows (week ending Thursday, October 30) showed a sequential downtick in laden vessels from China to the U.S. (-10%), with YoY drop-off continuing at -35%.
- Port Optimizer sequentials indicate a deterioration next week, with a return to positive the following week as TEUs appear to have found a floor of ~90k. Expected sequential imports into the Port of Los Angeles are set to be down -5% TEUs (November 14), while early readings suggest a +4% increase two weeks out. YOY trends show +6% and -30% over the next two weeks, reflecting volatility and challenges in timing YoY comparisons.
- Rail intermodal volumes on the West Coast were -6% YoY, following last week’s -7%. The previously positive growth trends over the summer likely reflected a load/unload lag and freight moving out of warehouses, while recent declines may signal muted import trends after the earlier pull-forward.
- Ocean container rates rose +48% sequentially, possibly due to attempts to push through GRIs ahead of contract season, but remain under heavy pressure YoY (-43%). Some normalization may occur soon following the surge.
- Truckload availability on the West Coast continues to deteriorate during what is typically peak season, now down -30% YoY.
Key chart from the report:
The easing of U.S.-China trade tensions couldn’t have come at a better time, given the softening across major maritime shipping routes between Asia and the U.S.
ZeroHedge Pro subscribers can read the full report in the usual place.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
