Mumbai Maersk is one of the world’s largest container ships owned by Maersk, the Danish shipping giant. Recently the ship was loaded with an astonishing 19,038 Containers at Tanjung Pelepas Port in Malaysia. The ship is on its way to Rotterdam in Europe. According to a news report, the ship beat all previous world records with the loading of over 19,000 boxes.

Click to enlarge

Source: Maritime Professional

To put those 19K+ containers in perspective, here is what a typical 20 foot container can hold:

• 200 full-sized mattresses
• 48,000 bananas
• 50-60 refrigerators
• 400 flat screen TVs

Below is another cool infographic:

Click to enlarge

Source: Shippo

Tourism is a major industry in most European countries. Millions of tourists flow into the major cities like London, Paris, Barcelona, etc. every year and the numbers only keep growing. Infrastructure in these and other tourist destinations are unable to keep up with the needs of the mass hordes of tourists everyday.

A recent article in Der Spiegel discussed about the impacts of mass tourism on European cities. From the article:

There were times when the hotels lining the beaches in Benidorm, in Arenal on Mallorca and along the Adriatic Sea in Italy, were symbols of the ugliness of modern mass tourism. In retrospect, though, that era seems almost quiet. Benidorm and Arenal are cities that were created so that Europeans would have a place lie on the beach in summer. They are artificial resorts and not very nice, but they do serve a purpose: as factories for mass tourism that could just as easily be removed should the need arise.

Today, these tourist reserves no longer fill the demand. The crowds of sun-seekers have grown so large on the beaches of Southern Europe, that some small bays on Mallorca should actually be closed due to overcrowding. Even along the North and Baltic seas in Germany, hotels and pensions are fully booked out in places like Sylt and Rügen.

The chart below shows the top 5 European cities and their tourist numbers and reviews:

Click to enlarge

Source: Paradise Lost – How Tourists Are Destroying the Places They Love, Der Spiegel

The entire article is worth a read.

Below is a picture of Prague, another growing European tourist city.

Prague, Czech Republic

The Fed Funds Rate currently stands at 2.0%. For many years during the global financial crisis the rate stood at 0.25% which is effectively 0%. Then the rate started to slowly go up and was at 1.50% in Dec, 2017.  The Fed targets a rate of 3.50% by 2020.

Higher rates lead to higher interest rates for consumers for products like credit cards, personal loans, mortgages, etc. Lower rates have the opposite effect.

US Fed tightening also leads to boom and bust cycles since lower rates help drive assets of all types to bubble levels and higher rates have the opposite effect basically creating booms and busts. The following chart shows the effect of fed tightening and the crises that followed from 1915:

Click to enlarge

Source: The Oversold Gold Market Creates An Asymmetric Opportunity With This Strategy by Adem Tumerkan, Palisade Research

From the above article:

Many forget that most usually every time the Fed has tightened, there’s some sort of financial crisis.

It’s not hard to see why. . .

Putting it simply – as Austrian Economist Ludwig Von Mises, and Rogue Keynesian Economist Hyman Minsky have explained: cutting interest rates artificially boosts asset prices and destabilizes markets. And when rates are eventually raised later, the ‘malinvestment’ is revealed and liquidated – pushing asset prices down.

Hence the boom-bust cycle. There’s more to it – but that’s the gist: rate cuts spur the good years and form bubbles, and raising rates pops them.