Boy, oh boy, where do we start today?

It’s tough to pick up the Wall Street Journal each morning. I can’t recall any time in my adult life when the economic news has been so consistently down-beat (to say nothing of the sad comic opera in Illinois with the Governor trying to sell the Senate seat to the highest bidder, which has to mark a new low in American public life). But back to business.

Today’s hit of gloom-and-doom: APL, the fabled west coast ocean carrier, has announced that it is cutting its work force and will be leaving its Oakland, CA headquarters for a destination to be announced; meanwhile Maersk is taking capacity off the seas.

For the last half-dozen years of my journalistic career, as Editorial Director of World Trade, I’ve been covering developments in the global and domestic supply chains. Until lately, it’s been a pretty ‘up-side’ story: more of everything (production, trade, revenue, volume). That’s definitely changed---starkly and quickly. 

The axiomatic thing about markets that they always go over the edge, too much up-side excess followed by too much down-side contraction. So the question I keep asking myself as I read my daily Journal is where we are on this cycle? Alas, much as I wish it weren’t the case, it feels to me like we’re still descending down that steep, slippery slope.

We’re going to produce a special section for a forthcoming World Trade issue addressing what needs to be done to---if not turn the ship around---at least keep it from going down.

Key, of course, will be to conserve assets and ride out the storm. But the danger, as economists keep noting, is a world-wide deflation in which everybody backs off spending and prices collapse.

What do you think we should do?