Commentary

It’s an amazing thing: After a year of meetings, conference calls, multiple draft panel ideas and draft agendas; after dozens (hundreds?) of speaker recruitment calls around the world; new ideas, old ideas, rejected ideas and a pretty solid group of keepers; through industry ups and downs and an election; and after myriad distractions, errors and omissions, starts and stops, cancellations and last-minute changes, the 13th annual TPM Conference has come and gone, and planning for TPM 2014 is beginning.

Twitter may be an unparalleled tool to toss out a short thought, idea or a headline, but to say it tells half the story does it too much justice; it tells a much smaller fraction of the story. Below are a few of my tweets or re-tweets from this month’s TPM Conference with a bit more than 140 characters of explanation

The negative impacts of sequestration on the international trade community are looming for California's public ports, and what happens there will ripple through the national economy in a matter of weeks unless Congress takes quick action.

As the TPM Conference convenes in Long Beach this week, the trans-Pacific market’s ability to throw curveballs year after year continues to impress. In past years, these took the form of port congestion, West Coast labor unrest and biblical rail backups — all largely unanticipated and forcing the industry into crisis mode.

A contracted carrier is paid by a shipper, and goes out of business. The shipper is then asked to pay a bill for that shipment by another carrier. Without its knowledge, the contracted carrier subcontracted the move to another carrier. Must the shipper double-pay?

Shippers and logistics companies bear a high degree of risk exposure to intellectual property infringement. To mitigate that risk, it’s a good investment of time and effort to employ the full range of resources available to U.S. companies.