"Overview of Northern Ireland Trade"

From the BBC:

A No 10 source says a Brexit deal is "essentially impossible" after a call between the PM and Angela Merkel... They also claimed she said a deal would never be possible unless Northern Ireland stayed in a customs union.

I'm all in favour of a (re)united Ireland and NI remaining in the EU customs union is a step in that direction. I'm not sure why the EU is so adamant, but it's not necessarily A Bad Thing.

It depends largely on whether NI trades more with RoI or more with GB? It makes sense to be in a customs union with your largest trading partner.

NISRA says that NI-GB trade is about four times as much as NI-RoI trade (or twice as much as combined NI-RoI and NI-rEU trade). GB is further away, but fifteen times as big as RoI, so that looks about right. Which means that NI would be better off (or less worse off) in the UK customs union and not in the EU customs union (which is not the answer I wanted).

Ho hum.

US Sanctions

The list of countries on which the USA imposes sanctions grows every year, as does the severity of the sanctions, despite they hardly seem to work.

Traditional thinking is that imposing sanctions on any particular country is but a pin prick for the USA economy, it is a massive burden for the other country. My thinking is that as the list grows, those pin pricks turn into a proper wound, and things get markedly better for countries on the naughty list.

If the USA imposes sanctions on Country Z, then that's bad for the USA, very bad for Country Z but rather good for all the other pariah countries who now have a new trading partner. So Cuba can now trade with Iran, Syria, Russia, North Korea, Venezuela, Russia etc and Country Z.

If the USA goes mental and imposes sanctions on PR China for having the temerity to trade with today's Bad Boys North Korea, and by extension on every country which trades with PR China, then I would assume that the rest of the world would decide to cut the USA loose and merrily trade with each other and with Russia, Iran etc and it would be the USA losing out massively, in which case, one would assume, it would meekly come back to the table.

But while I was reading around, I stumbled across this fine article explaining why sanctions don't achieve the desired effect with the concept of the J-curve (scroll down to end of article). Which is probably far more interesting than my hypotheticals above.

Fun Online Polls: Immigrants, expat's & trade deals.

The results to last week's Fun Online Poll were as follows:

Citizens from other EU Member States currently living in the UK should…

… all get permanent residence visas automatically - 13%
… apply for British citizenship if they want to stay - 11%
… be made to reapply for work permits every few years - 13%
… given the same rights as other EU Member States give UK citizens - 58%
… be told to leave the UK soonest - 4%
Other, please specify - 1%

Good, I was with the majority on that one, I've absolutely no grudge against foreigners living here (being half a foreigner myself, married to one etc) and in truth I would not like to see any of them made to leave (apart from the crims and the scroungers), but fair's fair and all that.

A good turnout of 104 votes, thanks to everybody who took part.

The gimmick being, this is not actually an EU competence - while the UK (or any other non-EU country) cannot strike trade deals with individual EU Member States, it can very much agree specific rules on immigration/emigration with each individual MS.
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While we're on the topic, I'm not sure if we've done what kind of post-EU trade deals we'd like to see, so that's this week's Fun Online Poll.

Vote HERE or use the widget in the sidebar.

"Shipping slump: Why a vessel worth $60m was sold as scrap"

From the BBC, mainly because of over-supply of ships, but also:

The Panama effect

And there was another reason to buy - and to buy big: the Panama Canal.

Last year it got a serious upgrade. The old locks could take container ships up to only 5,000 TEU (Twenty-Foot Equivalent Unit, roughly one container). These are known as Panamaxes.

But the new locks, with gates weighing 700 tonnes or more, are designed to take so called Neo-Panamaxes. These are giants, equivalent to the width and length of three football pitches laid end to end, and can carry about 13,000 TEU.

So shippers looking to carry cargoes from Asia to the American east coast ports, can now take Neo-Panamaxes through the new canal - and sell off their smaller Panamaxes. That's why Panamaxes like the Hammonia Grenada are going cheap - in fact, they're going nowhere...

Hitherto, from the point of view of Chinese exporting to Europe or the US Eastern Seaboard, they were pretty indifferent between using the Suez Canal (simple, cheap to build and maintain) and the Panama Canal (stupendous and expensive feat of engineering), so the tolls (largely rent to use that location) which either canal could charge was roughly the same.

Assuming people prefer using larger ships, whichever canal allows larger ships is obviously as a huge advantage and can charge extra tolls, but this suggests that Suezmax ships are still slightly larger than Neo-Panamax ships, in which case the Panama Canal has miserably failed to leap-frog the Suez Canal in terms of size, but nice try anyway.

"Northern ports tempt shippers away from Dover after migrant crisis"

Emailed in by Physiocrat, from the FT:

Ports outside the south-east have benefited from disruption at Dover, helping them to win a greater share of Britain’s growing container and vehicle trade. Northern ports have been selling the benefits of avoiding the congested roads of the south-east and investing in infrastructure just as some hauliers sought alternatives to Dover, hit by the migrant crisis.

The cross-channel route has been declared secure a month after the demolition of the “Jungle” refugee camp and freight traffic is growing again. But government figures for the first half of the year show a drop at Dover as traffic was displaced. Harwich and Felixstowe, the big south-east container ports, also lost traffic to London Gateway, which is expanding fast...

That's only half the story of course. The problem with Dover is not with Dover, but the fact that the traffic there arrives from Calais/France. So this is a golden opportunity for Belgian and Dutch ports as well.