Trimtabist

The US Trade Ledger — every US container gateway, every partner country, every month. Census-recorded, AIS-verified.

What the US trade record shows

This is a ledger of US containerised trade — every gateway, every partner country, every month. The numbers come from two places that cannot collude: Census records the government publishes, and vessel movements independently recorded. We run them against each other on purpose; where they stop agreeing, one of them is wrong, and we publish which. Every figure carries its evidence grade and a citation that will still resolve in ten years — and when we cannot trust a number, we withdraw it and print why.

Latest month: in May 2026 the eight major US container gateways received 14,660 kt of containerised imports worth $68.59B. Browse the record by port or by country of origin — every figure downloadable, citable, revision-tracked.

Findings — claims we are prepared to be wrong about

F-001 — PortWatch's Indian port-call series is unfit for publication from March 2025 The 40–49% collapse IMF PortWatch reports in Indian container port calls between mid-2025 and March 2026 did not happen in the physical trade. US cust…

The live layer

Latest vessel observation is 4.6h old — the upstream receiver network is interrupted (a known behaviour of the volunteer feed; disclosed, and the record below is unaffected). What is at the gateways right now → Verification of the record against physical vessel movements is retrospective and does not depend on the live feed — how that works.