President Joe Biden is taking on the concentrated market power of ocean shipping companies, although officials at the agency overseeing the industry indicated they lack both the jurisdiction and, for now, any evidence of wrongdoing.<\/p>\n
The White House said Biden will call on Congress at his State of the Union to address the immunity that shipping alliances have from antitrust scrutiny under current law. The Federal Maritime Commission will join with the Department of Justice in a new initiative announced Monday, to push for competition in ocean freight transportation.<\/p>\n
\u201cMany shippers really want us to do something about the rapid inflation of rates and decline in reliability in the ocean freight system,\u201d FMC Chairman Daniel Maffei said Monday.<\/p>\n
The FMC could take legal action against carriers \u201cif the rapid inflation of rates is due to some kind of artificial limitation on the supply of cargo space,\u201d Maffei said. \u201cBut even after we\u2019ve increased the reporting requirements and deepened our analysis, so far we have found no evidence of anything like that that\u2019s actionable and furthermore neither has the European Union or China.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWe will continue to scrutinize and keep looking, but so far we\u2019re seeing the opposite. We\u2019re actually seeing that the carriers are adding capacity, and in fact increase number of ships, overall,\u201d Maffei said.<\/p>\n