A Day In The Life Of Global Trade

Viewed from a desk on wall street, trade can look like an inaccessible agglomeration of breathless headlines about escalating economic wars and sterile data. Yet up close, the buying and selling of goods and services is an astonishing organism: Here, geopolitical decisions and the markets’ responses to them have daily physical consequences. ¶ To capture an ordinary day during this extraordinary period in the history of the global economy, Bloomberg Markets deployed reporters across the world to see the inner workings of trade up close. From storefronts in Seoul and Tokyo to border crossings in Africa and the Middle East, Wednesday, Dec. 4, was ostensibly a day like any other. What the reporters saw were the nuts and bolts of a global economy that—whether because of the march of technology or the consequences of rising protectionism and shifting trade patterns—is confronting an inevitable and possibly irreversible wave of change.

- Shawn Donnan

Lock 27, Mississippi River

It’s 10:36 a.m., and under a bright blue sky, the tugboat Donna Rushing is nudging a 15-barge load into the busiest lock on the Mississippi River. The St. Louis-based tug and her twin diesels are pushing a motley haul of soybeans, steel slag, and benzene. The linked convoy is 1,140 feet long and 105 feet wide, or the equivalent of a quarter-mile stretch of interstate that spans nine lanes and holds 870 truckloads of cargo. The lock, in Granite City, Ill., is just 5 feet wider than the barges. Delicate stuff.

Observing this from Lock 27’s control room is Quentin Pearson, a 61-year-old U.S. Navy veteran. Darting back and forth, he reaches for his radio to give instructions to a pair of tugs waiting to go north after the Donna Rushing’s load, heading south, is safely through. Then he rushes back over to the computers that control the lock’s valves and gates. From there, he’ll lower the water level by 7 feet, sending the Donna Rushing on its way to St. Louis.

Once the tug and its convoy are safely in the lock’s main basin, the captain’s voice comes across on Pearson’s radio: “We’re tied off.” With a click of Pearson’s mouse, valves open, and water rushes out of the lock’s chamber. By 10:58 a.m., the downstream gates have opened, and the Donna Rushing and her load are creeping out of the lock. This 22-minute sequence will be repeated more than two dozen times today at Lock 27, through which more than 65 million tons of cargo pass each year.

“Roads and railroads are the veins of America. But the rivers are the arteries, still, of America,” says Jermey Garzia, Lock 27’s lockmaster. A single barge carries 1,500 tons, or the equivalent of 58 tractor-trailers. A 15-barge tow like the one the Donna Rushing is shepherding carries the equivalent of two 100-car trains. —S.D.