The Panama Canal Cut to 32 Transits a Day Just as US Imports Peaked

The Panama Canal entered the busiest import quarter of the American calendar on Tuesday with its daily capacity at the tightest level of the year. From September 15 the Canal Authority capped transits at 32 vessels per day, down from 36 under normal water conditions, and said the limit holds until further notice. That cut landed two weeks after US ports absorbed 2,603,709 TEU of containerized imports in August, the third highest monthly volume on record according to Descartes Datamyne data, with East and Gulf Coast gateways taking 40.7 percent of it. The two facts belong to one story: record demand is peaking directly into a shrinking bottleneck, and the price of getting around it is now vis…