Drilling Deep: The US Postal Service at a crossroads

Image: Flickr/Travis Wise

The untenable situation at the U.S. Postal Service is coming to a possible breaking point.

It is carrying a significant amount of e-commerce traffic but other competitors want that business. It continues to lose money and has an enormous pension burden that no other entity in America has. It suddenly has an unexpected role in the presidential election. And it has a controversial new leader.

On the Drilling Deep podcast this week, John Kingston speaks with his colleague Mark Solomon, a longtime expert on the Postal Service, on these challenges and how the agency might confront them.

Kingston opens the podcast by talking about the continuing lag in the diesel market, good news for any consumers of the fuel.

More articles by John Kingston

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John Kingston

John has an almost 40-year career covering commodities, most of the time at S&P Global Platts. He created the Dated Brent benchmark, now the world’s most important crude oil marker. He was Director of Oil, Director of News, the editor in chief of Platts Oilgram News and the “talking head” for Platts on numerous media outlets, including CNBC, Fox Business and Canada’s BNN. He covered metals before joining Platts and then spent a year running Platts’ metals business as well. He was awarded the International Association of Energy Economics Award for Excellence in Written Journalism in 2015. In 2010, he won two Corporate Achievement Awards from McGraw-Hill, an extremely rare accomplishment, one for steering coverage of the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster and the other for the launch of a public affairs television show, Platts Energy Week.