{"id":13889,"date":"2015-10-28T06:37:23","date_gmt":"2015-10-28T11:37:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=13889"},"modified":"2015-10-28T06:37:23","modified_gmt":"2015-10-28T11:37:23","slug":"and-now-trucking-is-suddenly-slowing-down","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=13889","title":{"rendered":"And Now Trucking Is Suddenly Slowing Down"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3 class=\"entry-title\"><a href=\"http:\/\/wolfstreet.com\/2015\/10\/28\/why-the-heck-is-trucking-slowing-down-swift-cummins-load-to-truck-ratio\/\" target=\"_blank\">And Now Trucking Is Suddenly Slowing Down<\/a><\/h3>\n<p>This comes at the totally wrong time. Trucking had been booming. 2014 had been a banner year. Capacity was squeezed, and rates were rising, so trucking companies went on a buying binge, ordering everything in the book in preparation for red-hot demand in 2015 and more banner years down the road. But then came 2015.<\/p>\n<p>Among businesses, over-ordering and tepid sales caused inventories to rise and the inventory-to-sales ratio to spike to\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/wolfstreet.com\/2015\/10\/09\/last-time-this-ratio-reached-that-level-stocks-crashed\/\"><u>Financial Crisis proportions<\/u><\/a>. And now businesses are trying to bring them down by trimming orders because they\u2019re having trouble selling more to the middle class, the over-indebted modern proletariat whose stagnant incomes are being eaten up by skyrocketing costs of housing, healthcare, college, and the like \u2013 and they simply can\u2019t spend that much on shippable items.<\/p>\n<p>And now this is ricocheting through the industry.<\/p>\n<p>Monday after hours, the largest US truckload carrier, Swift,\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/investor.swifttrans.com\/sites\/swifttrans.investorhq.businesswire.com\/files\/report\/file\/Q3.2015_Letter_to_Stockholders_Final.pdf\"><u>announced earnings<\/u><\/a>. And on Tuesday, it clarified the debacle. It\u2019s suffering from indigestion. The high costs from its red-hot capacity increase \u2013 average truck count jumped by 831 trucks in the third quarter from a year earlier \u2013 are now slamming into swooning freight demand.<\/p>\n<p>Operating revenue declined 1%, which Swift blamed on the disappearing fuel surcharge, though it didn\u2019t explain why it is getting away with still charging $109 million in fuel surcharges when diesel prices have plunged to rock-bottom.<\/p>\n<p>So it\u2019s cutting back. In its pervious disclosure, it announced that its average truck count for 2015 would grow by 700-1,100 trucks. Now it cut the growth down to 500-600 trucks, \u201cgiven that the freight environment is softer than we originally expected, and peak volumes have not yet materialized as in years past,\u201d it said.<\/p>\n<p>September is the beginning of the holiday shipping season. Volume should be sharply higher. But it\u2019s not happening [read\u2026\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/wolfstreet.com\/2015\/10\/14\/us-freight-shipments-morose-worst-september-since-2010\/\"><u>US Freight Shipments Have Worst September since 2010<\/u><\/a>].<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>And Now Trucking Is Suddenly Slowing Down This comes at the totally wrong time. Trucking had been booming. 2014 had been a banner year. Capacity was squeezed, and rates were rising, so trucking companies went on a buying binge, ordering everything in the book in preparation for red-hot demand in 2015 and more banner years [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[162,312,10304,1264,805,10303,4254,4255],"class_list":["post-13889","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-consumption","tag-financial-crisis","tag-freight-shipments","tag-recession","tag-trade","tag-trucking","tag-wolf-richter","tag-wolfstreet"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13889","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13889"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13889\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13890,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13889\/revisions\/13890"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13889"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13889"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13889"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}