Economics

Persistance is important in reaching any deal, but delivering on what you promise is equally important.

Truck orders and tonnage both posted strong gains in January suggesting there is no immediate end coming to the good times.

From a merchant perspective, Shipping with Amazon would provide increased competition in the shipping space, while also providing Amazon with more data about the products people are buying.

Signs are pointing to a new reality: self-driving trucks will help the industry. And the people who keep it running will continue to show us why they’re such an important part of the supply chain.

Current financial news headlines are full of stories about inflation and the resurgence of inflation in the U.S. economy.  

Retail sales showed unexpected sluggishness in both January and December, which was revised downward.

Markets are meant to contain some volatility. While 1,000 point drops in the Dow are unsettling, it still makes for an index whose value is greater than 24,000. Such a move is only around 4% — common enough as far as such corrections go.

Despite all this good news, an underlying problem remains for many truckers – getting paid. There are still some shippers that are dragging their feet when it comes to settling their bills, and that leaves carriers short of cash.

With the ELD mandate enforcement date behind us, owners of trucking companies can now focus on the next sweeping change to impact their business; implementation of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act that was signed into law by President Trump on Dec. 22, 2017.

In the last few weeks, there has been a lot of confusion in the driver community regarding the per diem, which has been eliminated for company drivers under the new Republican tax plan.

On Friday, the U.S. Department of Labor published a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that expands the ability of associations to offer health insurance plans.

The latest weekly and monthly DAT Trucking Freight Barometers are continuing to surge strongly into even more positive territory, and proving our September prediction that “the ‘fall surge’ is happening for the first time since 2007,” has come to pass.

With third-quarter GDP coming in at 3.2% growth and fourth-quarter GDP also expected to best the 3% mark, which would be the third consecutive quarter of 3%-plus growth, and a newly minted tax plan promising to start moving the economy forward, times would appear to be ripe for trucking.

The days of drivers carrying around multiple credit cards to handle life on the road are quickly disappearing. Once, drivers might have a company credit card for expenses, a fuel card to pay for fuel, and even their own card for non-job-related expenses, but that is all changing as innovations in fuel cards might be making the company credit card obsolete.

The Dow Jones U.S. Trucking Index (DJUSTK) surged to an all-time high for trucking today, and ended up at growing to 4.39 for the day.

Everyone who is even remotely aware of the trucking industry in the U.S. knows that the ELD rule goes into effect on Monday. Time will tell, but if there are not massive numbers of trucks parked on the side of the road, and shippers are actually able to find trucks to move loads, we will not be surprised. 

Recently, Mexico shifted into a supply-and-demand based pricing structure for its fuel markets, ditching the old system where the government set the fuel price through state-owned oil company Pemex as it seeks to attract more U.S. investment.

By the first week of December, the DAT weekly spot market price for dry-van loads had reached $2.09 (including fuel surcharge) or almost 30% higher in just 9 months. This is an extraordinary, but what is more extraordinary is the fact that the trucking marketplace is more than 3 times the size of the Bitcoin market capitalization, which has grown 22% in 12 months.

Last-minute efforts to delay or stop the electronic logging device rule (ELD) are continuing, but it may be too little, too late unless President Donald Trump throws a Hail Mary.

Daimler’s Mercedes-Benz Vans brand has introduced its third-generation Sprinter van at an event in Stuttgart, Germany. The van features many of the iconic attributes it always has, but has added new connectivity to further improve its utilization.