faultlinesweekly

Two federal series describe U.S. goods imports from China every month, and neither contains a tariff. The Bureau of Labor Statistics prices what the foreign seller charges. The Census Bureau reports what U.S. Customs and Border Protection appraises the same goods at. Because the duty is absent from both, dividing one by the other strips the price term out of the trade numbers and leaves something neither agency publishes. The July 2026 import price release, issued August 18, 2026, put the price index for imports from China 2.7 percent above its July 2025 level. Eight months earlier, in the November 2025 data released January 15, 2026, it sat 3.6 percent below its year-earlier level. Both Measurements Stop Before the Duty Is Assessed The BLS question-and-answer page states: "The prices for the items used to calculate the Import/Export Price Indexes exclude duties." The reason is a national-accounts requirement, stated in the Handbook of Methods: "For example, import...

A price round trip, a volume staircase Two series that describe the same disruption are telling different stories, and the gap between them is the most interesting thing in the second-quarter energy data. The price series has already normalized. EIA monthly average WTI spot ran 64.51 in February 2026, jumped to 91.38 in March, peaked at 102.13 in May, and fell back to 80.46 in July. That is a spike and most of a round trip inside six months — the classic shape of a supply shock that markets decided was temporary. The volume series did not round-trip. U.S. crude oil exports ran 4,043 thousand barrels per day in March 2026, then 5,593 in April and 5,728 in May. The March-to-April move is +38% in a single month. Against the January 2024 – March 2026 average of roughly 4,049 thousand b/d, May sits +41% higher. And this is not a series that normally moves that way: across those twenty-seven months, no single month printed above 4,600. The closest was 4,593 in February 2024. ...

Two administrative clocks are running down inside the critical-minerals system, and both expire before the end of this year. Neither is a mine, a shipping lane, or a price. Both are dates in Chinese regulatory announcements, and how they resolve will do more to set magnet availability in 2027 than any tonnage figure published between now and then. The first is 10 November 2026 . On 7 November 2025, China's Ministry of Commerce issued Announcement No. 70, suspending six export-control announcements dated 9 October 2025 — Nos. 55, 56, 57, 58, 61 and 62 — through that date. The second is 27 November 2026 , the expiry attached to Announcement No. 72 of 9 November 2025, which suspended Article 2 of Announcement No. 46 of 2024, the provision barring U.S.-bound shipments of gallium, germanium, antimony, graphite and superhard materials. A suspension is not a repeal. Nothing was struck from the control list; the instruments were parked with a return date attached. That distinction is t...

On 13 August 2026, Drewry's World Container Index composite was assessed at $4,339 per 40ft container , up 1% on the week. Shanghai–New York rose 10% to $8,706. Shanghai–Los Angeles rose 6% to $6,244. Taken alone, that pattern reads as a demand wave building on the transpacific, with U.S. import volumes due to confirm it a month or two later. The volume data was already published and pointed the other way. The Port of Los Angeles moved 499,552 loaded import TEUs in July 2026, down 8% year on year ; Long Beach moved 467,461, down 0.1%, on total throughput of 928,508 TEUs, 1.7% below July 2025. The price of moving a box into the two largest U.S. container gateways was climbing while the number of boxes arriving was flat to falling. The Europe leg inverted the relationship. In the same assessment week, Shanghai–Genoa fell 8% to $5,080 and Shanghai–Rotterdam fell 5% to $4,425. On 14 August, Eurostat published June euro area trade: imports of €264.0 billion, up 13.1% year on year , ...