By Mike Wackett (The Loadstar) –
Container freight indices are on the rise again, but even at their highly elevated levels they mask the true cost of shipping.
For example, the Freightos Baltic Index (FBX) North European component jumped by 6% this week, to $7,791 per 40 ft – a huge 450% increase on the rate a year ago, but still unlikely to turn the heads of carriers that can easily fill ships with containers paying double that rate.
A leading UK-based NVOCC has shown
The Loadstar its ‘best’ FAK rate offers for May from China to the UK, where space is still available, as $13,500 per 40ft – and that is before surcharges are added.
Credit: GMaple Design/shutterstock.com
Greenwich Mean Time
In the previous essay I introduced mean solar time, which averaged the annual variation in apparent solar time so as to generate a time scale that was more consistent with the time scale generated by clocks that used a mechanical device to realize the reference frequency. The device that generated the reference frequency might produce an event every second, but other configurations were possible. In every case, the device that generated the reference frequency was coupled to a second system that converted the reference frequency to a series of one-second ticks that were used to drive the clock display. The source of the reference frequency and the counting system were designed together to generate the one-second ticks.
FBX Index April: Current Market Summary
The Freightos Baltic Global Container Index (FBX) fell 3% this month to $4,155/FEU, still nearly triple its level this time last year, as most of the month prior to the Suez Canal incident was characterized by some small easing of conditions along the supply chain.
On the transpacific, port congestion and delays continue to be a problem, though the number of container ships waiting outside the ports of LA and Long Beach has subsided somewhat from its peak last month and there are reports that it is getting easier for shippers to secure capacity out of Asia to the US. Some of the easing may be due to shippers and carriers seeking alternate US destinations for volumes normally bound for southern California.
Suez Ripples Raises Rates for All Containerships – gCaptain gcaptain.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from gcaptain.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Credit: J. Burrus/NIST
As a physicist in the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Time and Frequency Division, I have worked in the general area of operating atomic clocks and using output signals from them to distribute time and frequency information for more than 40 years. I am also a Fellow at JILA, an institute operated jointly by NIST and the University of Colorado Boulder, and I teach in the physics department of the university.
I came to Boulder in 1967 as a post-doc at JILA. I joined NIST when it was still the National Bureau of Standards in 1969, and I was initially a physicist in the Radio Standards Physics Division. This division was engaged in several research projects that used lasers whose wavelengths were stabilized by adjusting them to match the wavelengths naturally absorbed by an atom or molecule.