It’s hard to describe globalization to a mayfly in a manner that will hold his interest. It takes a gifted storyteller to interest a creature with a 24-hour lifespan in anything that’s out of sight, or takes longer than a couple of hours to play out. In this he is much like the modern American, who has little appetite for any story that takes more than 140 characters to tell, about an event that takes more than a few hours to unfold. (As to why the American consumer of news acts and thinks more like a mayfly (Ephemeroptera) than a homo sapiens, well, that’s another question, for another time.)

But the fact is that homo sapiens ephemera simply cannot grasp the fact that a long, slow-burning fuse, however boring it is to watch, almost always leads to a terrible explosion. By that time, ephemera has forgotten the fuse and is always surprised. (“Wow, no one could have seen that coming,” he says.)

So it is with globalized trade, the system set up to allow increasingly impoverished people to borrow money on their credit cards to buy cheap crap — made in China by totally impoverished and sometimes enslaved people — at their local MartMart store. The brilliance of the system is that while the people who make the crap and the people who consume it remain impoverished, the corporations that manufacture, finance, transport, market and insure the crap get filthy rich. (Stay with me, homo sapiens ephemera, something’s going to happen in the next graph, I swear.)

Teensy flaw in the operating theory: once the lower (formerly known as middle) class has spent all its money and maxed out all of its credit and lost all of its jobs to the truly impoverished in the Third World because they work for so much less, there’s nothing left with which to buy cheap crap. Consequently — make that inevitably — global trade has been slowing steadily since 2010, which you may remember was Year Two of the Great Recovery from the Great Recession. (I know, Ephemera, I lied about something happening in this graph, the next one, I promise. Stay with me! Where’s a good clickbait writer when you need one? “Financial genius reveals shocking truth about global bikini trade! You won’t believe your eyes!!!”)

Okay, now that I’ve got you for a few more seconds, here’s what’s happened. After years of telling you about the burning fuse [Global Recession Accelerating toward Depression last October, World Trade is Coming to a Halt [UPDATED] in January and They’re Parking the Trains. And the Ships and Planes and Trucks… in May, to name a few] something has finally blown up. Not the whole enchilada yet, but a big chunk of it. The seventh largest container-ship operator in the world is insolvent.

Who gives a farthing? You do, that’s who, because as a result YOUR KIDS MAY NOT GET THIS YEAR’S MUST-HAVE, EVERYBODY-ELSE-HAS-ONE XMAS TOYS! Talk about Apocalypse Now.

89 monster container ships owned by Hanjin Shipping Company, South Korea’s largest shipping line, were at sea when the company asked for bankruptcy protection from South Korean courts. Immediately, ports worldwide began refusing them permission to dock for fear they would be unable to collect docking fees. If they did dock, they would be unable to unload without paying upfront the costs of unloading. If they did unload the cargo would not be moved from the terminal unless shippers were paid in advance. And of course refueling the vessels would require cash in advance.

Fourteen billion dollars worth of cargo, much of it Christmas merchandise that must be unloaded so to make the peak shopping season that begins the day after Thanksgiving, is stranded on ships that need over half a billion dollars in cash to cover current expenses. The company has raised $90 million, and has asked the South Korean government for an emergency loan of $90 million, but prospects for avoiding liquidation are bleak. The company needs another $1.2 billion almost immediately to roll over maturing debt, and having incurred staggering losses for four of the last five years, may not be able to do it.

Hanjin is hardly alone. The world’s shipping industry has been losing serious money since last year, and is on track to lose $5 billion this year. Industry analysts attribute the losses to an oversupply of ships, but another way to put that is to blame it on an undersupply of cargo.

Although four Hanjin ships have been granted protection by US courts and have raised the money to unload their cargoes in the U.S., havoc continues to spread through global commerce where Hanjin is being seen as merely the first card to fall.

I know. It took too long to explain. Tune in tomorrow, homo sapiens ephemera, for the 140-character version.