Soundings, Shipping Shocks and the Shopping Basket | Pole Star Global
Pole Star Global Maritime Intelligence · Analysis August 2026

Soundings:
fifty years of
shipping shocks
in the basket.

Nine disruptions across five waterways and three continents: embargo, blockade, piracy, grounding, drought, and closure. One question runs through all of them, how far does a blocked sea lane travel before it reaches a household? AIS does not measure inflation, but it records the physical beginning of the chain, months before the statistics catch up.

Data: IMF · EIA · UNCTAD · FAO · World Bank · ECB · Eurostat · Panama Canal Authority Analysis: Pole Star Global

Estimated contribution to headline inflation

Percentage points added at peak · select a chokepoint to open its record

Observed Modelled scenario Freight rate rise (right axis)

How long the chain takes to run

Median elapsed time from the disruption to each stage · scrub the head to trace it

0 months elapsed

How long the strait stays shut

Hormuz is the only event here where duration is still an open variable. Drag the dial to extend the 2026 disruption and watch the last bar redraw. Scenarios apply IMF freight-pass-through elasticity, a doubling of global freight rates adds roughly 0.7pp to inflation, peaking after about twelve months.

+3.0 pp
Peak inflation contribution
12 mo
Months to peak effect
43 %
Food share of spending, low-income economies
Modelled path of the inflation contribution over 30 months
Baseline · disruption resolved within one month

Method. Inflation contributions are peak estimates of the disruption’s addition to headline consumer-price inflation in the most exposed economies, drawn from the cited sources and, where sources give ranges, from the midpoint. They are not additive and not directly comparable across regimes: the 1970s figures reflect economies with far higher energy intensity and widespread wage indexation.

Freight. Freight rate change is the peak rise on affected routes against the pre-event baseline. Somali piracy reflects contract-level dry-bulk cost increases (Besley et al.), not spot rates.

Scenarios. The 6, 12 and 18-month Hormuz paths are Pole Star Global models, not observed outcomes. They combine the IMF cross-country freight elasticity (+0.7pp per doubling of rates, peaking at roughly twelve months and persisting up to eighteen) with the compounding fertiliser and food-chain lag described in IMF research on Hormuz trade exposure. Treat them as illustrative ranges.

Coverage. Transit counts referenced in the accompanying article derive from public AIS, which understates traffic when vessels reduce or suspend transmissions in high-risk areas.

Lags. The transmission chain uses median timings from the literature, not from any single event. Retail fuel pass-through completes within one to two months (ECB, 2026). Higher shipping costs reach import prices at the dock within about two months and pass quickly to producer prices, but the effect on consumer prices peaks at roughly twelve months and persists up to eighteen, a doubling of freight rates adding about 0.7pp to headline inflation across 143 countries (Carrière-Swallow, Deb, Furceri, Jimenez & Ostry, IMF, 2022). Oil-driven inflation peaks far faster, after about two months. Separate IMF work on port congestion finds delay-driven inflation peaking earlier still, at around five months.

Scope. The nine events span five waterways, the Persian Gulf and Hormuz, the Gulf of Aden and Bab el-Mandeb, Suez, the Black Sea, and Panama, and four distinct mechanisms: lost supply, denied route, priced risk, and lost capacity. Black Sea 2022 is included as a blockade rather than a chokepoint closure: the water was navigable, the ports were not. Panama 2023 is the only entry with no adversary, and the only one likely to recur on a climate cycle rather than a political one.

© 2026 Pole Star Global · Sea clearly.