Joe Brusuelas, chief economist for the consultancy RSM, was landing in Seattle about noon last Thursday when he noticed something odd from his plane window: There was only one ship in the city’s normally bustling port, and only one other ship actively offloading containers at a dock. Conversations with local business owners after he landed confirmed his suspicions, later backed up by data reflecting activity at West Coast ports: Fallout from the spread of the coronavirus in Asia is compounding a lingering hangover from the U.S.-China trade war, crimping the flow of goods from across the Pacific. Which is to say that while the disease has yet to bloom into a full-scale public health crisis in the United States, the leading edge of the economic disruption it could soon wreak has already arrived on our shores. Zooming in on Southern California, Brusuelas found that shipping container traffic […]