Friday morning the United States will get its first comprehensive look at how the labor market is faring amid the turmoil of the COVID-19 pandemic when the Department of Labor publishes the March Employment Situation report, commonly known as the “Jobs Report”. Today we’re sharing the fourth of our twice weekly video series covering the […]
No one quite knows what the lasting impacts of the coronavirus pandemic will be for the freight industry. If past crises are any guide, moments of crisis tend to accelerate shifts that were already underway. But there are also points of continuity. Today we’re sharing the third of our twice weekly video series featuring Ari […]
This has been a rollercoaster of a week and it’s not even Friday. Financial markets recorded record losses on Monday, record gains on Tuesday, and another big increase on Wednesday. Will the proposals being considered in the nation’s capital be enough to sustain the economy while businesses are shuttered and states on lockdown? Today we’re […]
Earlier this week we shared our initial thoughts on the freight market given the volatile economic environment of the past two weeks. In moments of great uncertainty there is, by definition, more noise than signal. Our goal is not to add to the noise, but to simply state facts about the freight market and the […]
This morning the Federal Reserve Board published February Industrial Production data and the U.S. Census Bureau published February Retail Sales. During normal times, this data would provide the first official pulse on the state of freight demand. These are, of course, anything but normal times. The sudden market shift over the first half of March […]
Carrier bankruptcies over the past year have sparked some fears about whether there will be enough truck drivers when freight demand eventually rebounds. The freight industry is cyclical and the market can quickly shift. But fears that recent bankruptcies among trucking companies will prompt meaningful numbers of drivers to seek jobs in other industries may […]
An abbreviated version of this article appeared on Trucks.com in February 2020 Driver turnover is notoriously high in the freight industry — with some estimates suggesting that, on average, trucking companies see their entire driver pool change over each year. Such eye-poppingly high turnover statistics would suggest a massive labor retention crisis. In a year […]
Industrial production continued to disappoint in January, dashing late-December hopes of a new start for the U.S. economy in the new year. The sectors with the biggest trade exposure (e.g., industrial manufacturing) faltered while the sectors that rely on domestic consumption (e.g., food and beverage, furniture and appliances) were rare points of strength. Unseasonably warm […]
The freight economy continued to contract in December, capping a year of steady retrenchment in truckload demand according to data released this morning by the Federal Reserve Board. The data came in soft, in line with expectations. Some of this can be written off to an unseasonably warm start to winter across much of the […]
With today’s November industrial activity data, it’s likely that the worst of the freight recession is now squarely in the rearview mirror. The November report was a clear improvement from October, though it’s important to keep some caveats in mind. It was always going to be easy to beat October: The closing days of the […]
