Matt Stoller, the research director at the American Economics Liberties Project, said that a Clinton-era deregulatory law contributed in part to the current supply chain crisis.
Stoller explained in a Friday appearance on Hill.TV’s “Rising” that the law deregulated the prices of shipping containers, which led to a consolidation of the types of containers being used. Previously, shipping containers of different sizes were used to enable access to different ports. However, the law led to the elimination of all but the firms with larger shipping containers, which cannot access certain ports as easily.
“So if we hadn’t actually deregulated this industry, if we had kept some of the price stability in place, you would see prices for shipping containers, which dropped dramatically and facilitated globalization — they probably wouldn’t have dropped as much, but you would have seen a much more stable shipping space,” Stoller said.
“And today when you have this kind of massive boom of imports, you wouldn’t be able to move cargo to different destinations. It wouldn’t be as overloaded and you’d have more firms coming into the market with different size boats,” he added.
Stoller’s remarks come as the United States braces for a frenzied holiday season amid a supply chain crisis stemming from a worker shortage and backlogs at ports, among other issues.
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