● Watch Now


BusinessDrilling Deep PodcastFuel NewsNewsPodcastTruck Driver IssuesTrucking

Drilling Deep: The Professor of Trucking gives his measure of the market

John Kingston
·

Steve Burks was a truck driver in an earlier professional capacity. He also earned  his bachelor’s degree, his master’s degree and then his Ph.D. He’s a professor of economics at the University of Minnesota-Morris where he continues to research truck drivers and the markets where they ply their trade.

He joins the Drilling Deep podcast this week along with host John Kingston to offer his views on the state of a market whose decline, he says, is radically different than the declines of the past, many of which he dealt with firsthand. 

We also talk about a set of numbers: the price of retail diesel versus the price of wholesale diesel. It’s a spread that had been frustrating to drivers as they kept hearing about the price of crude oil falling and they weren’t seeing any benefit. The relationship was completely out of whack. But as happens in markets, it no longer is. John will discuss what happened.


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.