In those years, the freight transportation market has enjoyed prosperous times and periods of pain and misery. The freight market undergoes boom-and-bust cycles, like all commoditized industries.
FreightWaves SONAR correctly predicted the start of a drop in the freight market in March 2022. Since then, the overcapacity spurred by the pandemic has caused freight-hauling rates to drop to 2019 levels — or worse. For the past 18-plus months, there have simply been too many trucks for too little freight.
However, the impact has gone beyond U.S. trucking fleets and freight brokerages. The problems are not confined to the United States or just trucking. Ocean carriers, railroads, air cargo carriers and freight forwarders around the world have been impacted as well.
No one at FreightWaves enjoys reporting bad news. One of my followers on X recently commented, “Everything you post/repost or talk about is doom and gloom. I challenge you to say/find something positive about the economy pertaining to the trucking industry.”
I would love to do so. Unfortunately, the good news in freight, transportation and logistics has been sparse
Severe recession in the freight market
After the market began to prove FreightWaves SONAR’s downturn prediction, some analysts and industry experts said the freight slowdown was a reversion to the mean. Unfortunately, it is not. We are in one of the worst downturns in freight market history, caused by a massive buildup of capacity, and it’s going to take time to burn it all off.
Simply put, the freight market is experiencing a severe recession. FreightWaves has an obligation to report that news.
Since early in 2022, many companies have gone out of business or severely cut back by letting employees go. Some of those companies were household names in the industry, such as Yellow Corp. and Convoy. Many others were much smaller, not known perhaps beyond their headquarters location. Nonetheless, the bankruptcies, closures and layoffs have piled up, and the financial and human losses have taken a toll.
The following synopses are some of the articles that FreightWaves has published in the past year that illustrate the poor freight economy. The full articles can be read by following the links; ongoing coverage of the “state of freight” can be found here on FreightWaves.com.
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