July 29, 2025 • 47 mins
Uncertainty and inflationary pressures tied to the Trump administration’s tariff policies may delay the trucking market’s recovery until next year. In this episode of the Talking Transports podcast, Dr. Jason Miller, a professor in supply chain management at Michigan State University’s Eli Broad College of Business, joins Lee Klaskow, Bloomberg Intelligence senior transportation and logistics analyst, to discuss how inflation may limit interest-rate cuts and weigh on consumer demand. Stronger demand will be key to tightening truck market conditions, especially as capacity exits remain sluggish. Miller also covers key freight indicators, chronic driver turnover, the outlook for autonomous trucking and the evolution of his mustache.
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Speaker 1 (00:07):
Hi everyone, this is Lee Clasgow when We're Talking Transports.
Welcome to Bloomberg Intelligence Talking Transports podcast. I'm your host,
Lee Clascaw, senior freight, transportation and logistics analysts at Bloomberg Intelligence,
Bloomberg's in house research arm of almost five hundred analysts
and strategists around the world before diving in little public
service announcement. Your support is instrumental to keep bringing great
(00:28):
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your support. So please, if you enjoy this podcast, share it,
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Speaker 2 (00:36):
Also, if you have any ideas.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
For a future episode or just want to talk transports,
please set me up on the Bloomberg terminal and on
LinkedIn or on Twitter at logistics Late. Now on to
our episode. I'm very excited to have Jason Miller with
us today. A professor in supply chain management at Michigan
State University's Eli Broad College of Business. He researches topics
(00:58):
at the intersection of apply chain management and economics, with
a special focus on the for hire trucking industry in
the United States. Welcome to the podcast, Jason.
Speaker 3 (01:09):
Hey, thanks so much for having Melee.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
It is it doctor Jason, doctor Miller.
Speaker 3 (01:13):
I can just go by Jason. I am super informal
with that title.
Speaker 1 (01:17):
All right, all right, and people that you know this
is an audio podcast, unfortunately, and they can't enjoy your mustache.
Speaker 2 (01:23):
That is one hell of a mustache.
Speaker 3 (01:25):
And you know, the funny story with that was when
I became interim chairperson of my department. You know, I
would get comments about looking too young, and I used
to have a full beard. I had shaved that off
with COVID, so I went from looking like a lumberjack
to kind of looking like maybe a non traditional undergrad.
(01:46):
And then I'm like, Okay, well I don't want to
have the itchy beard. So the mustache made its appearance.
Speaker 1 (01:51):
We'll keep on rocking and it looks good. Can you
talk a little bit about Michigan State Universal's logistics program.
Speaker 3 (01:57):
Yeah. So we're one of the oldest sort of integrated
supply chain programs. The program was sort of formally rebranded
supply chain back in the mid two thousands. We graduate
about three hundred and fifty undergraduates each year, making us
one of the larger programs. Very good job placement rates,
(02:18):
starting salaries around seventy thousand dollars and we are the
number one rank program now for over a decade in
a row at the undergraduate level by US News and
World Report. At the graduate level, we have a specialized
Masters of Science and Supply Chain Management program I teach
in that's aimed really at working professionals with multiple years
(02:41):
of experience, so really get the opportunity to go in
depth with folks who are in the trenches. Currently, we're
a big part of our MBA program. We have two
PhD programs in the department, and then our most recent
edition is what's called a Graduate Certificate and Supply Chain
(03:03):
Management that is aimed for folks who are out of
undergrad may have found themselves in a supply chain role
and they really want to get a fairly quick you know,
grounding and basis. Or for folks who majored in something
that they're not finding much job market success and they
need something to improve their job market chances.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
Right, and if you give out any honorary degrees, I
would love to add that to my resume.
Speaker 3 (03:28):
So that's a university central and I don't even know
how that whole process work.
Speaker 2 (03:34):
All right, Let's get down to business.
Speaker 1 (03:36):
So you know, like like I did in the intro,
you kind of talk about the cross section of logistics
in the economy. I know you're very focused on the
trucking industry, and you're well published, and you're very active
on social media and I love reading your posts. Just
for a little plug, where can people like find your
stuff outside of the university where you want?
Speaker 2 (03:55):
Are you on x?
Speaker 3 (03:56):
LinkedIn is primarily where I put everything, just because I
need that longer format to really start getting getting in
enough enough depth that it's interesting for me as an academic,
but it's also not too in depth to where the
average you know, person and industry is going to say, Okay,
this is this isn't for me.
Speaker 1 (04:16):
I recommend anyone that's listening to follow Jason on LinkedIn.
So what are you working on now? Like I'm assuming
you're you're looking deep into the rate cycle and to
demand kind of what are your takeaways on the state
of the North America trucking market?
Speaker 3 (04:32):
You know, right now, my general sense is we're really
sort of continuing to be stalled out on that. I'm
going to say, drive in truckload space. You know, if
you look outside of regular seasonal fluctuations, line haul spot
rates per dat haven't really budged much since Q one
of twenty twenty three. We've seen our usual tightening that
(04:54):
we'll see in June, in the midsummer, and then in
November and December. But certainly this year has been a
disappointment from my standpoint. When I you know, when I
did some writing back last December and was sort of
making a twenty twenty five forecast, I was anticipating a
much more bullish scenario. We at that point in time
(05:16):
and had one hundred basis points of interest rate cuts.
We were expecting that to flow through into construction and
capital investment. And it just seems that the tariffs, and
possibly even more important, that uncertainty surrounding tariffs, has just
sort of deflated that potential freight balloon. And I mean,
if you take a look, for example, June, single family
(05:38):
housing starts are down ten percent year over year twenty
five versus twenty four. And I don't think anybody that
you would have talked to, you know, seven eight months ago,
would have anticipated behavior like that.
Speaker 1 (05:50):
And you know, in the beginning of the year, we
were pretty optimistic about where the truck and market was
going to go. You know, we thought rates could get
contractual rates can increase by high single digits, maybe even
low double digits, and that's obviously been rained in considerably given.
Speaker 2 (06:06):
Where we are.
Speaker 1 (06:07):
So I guess from your standpoint, is it more or
less the policies out of Washington that are limiting where
trucking's going or is there something else that play there
that's just getting exasperated by what's going on in Washington.
Speaker 3 (06:23):
Now, I would really say it is the policies from Washington.
And you know, when I look so some of the
indicators I really look at that have been historically fairly
good predictors of where the trucking cycles are going to go.
It's especially like the Institute for Supply Managements PMI for
manufacturing new orders, as well as sort of an aggregate
(06:44):
new orders index that I put together from the five
Fed banks that report PMI type manufacturing surveys. And if
you take a look for all of those, just as
you mentioned, December January, and even to some extent in February,
we were starting to see new orders move solidly back
into expansion territory for the first time since really early
(07:06):
Q two of twenty twenty two, believe it or not,
and that just did a U turn by March. April
was quite rough. May and June were maybe a little better,
but still in contraction. July right now, from what we've seen,
is at most kind of neutral. And you can just
trace all of that to the tariff shocks that we've experienced,
(07:31):
and it seems to be really sort of that curtail
of capital investment activity, that curtail of single family construction,
and without that additional essentially freight you know, demand shock,
it just you can't start pushing carriers towards that upper
level of capacity utilization where they're starting to routinely, you know,
(07:54):
reject tenders putting the freight on the spot market to
get that cycle going, and so on. One area where
I differ from you know, sort of others in the
industry is look, for me, looking back at the data,
it sort of bullish. Cycles and trucking are always to
me about demand. Supply factors are very much secondary, Whereas
(08:16):
I think we've had so many conversations about this belief
that okay, low spot rates are going to lead to
even more attrition to capacity, or the most recent was
the English language proficiency is going to result in this
massive drop of capacity, and certainly, looking at the behavior
of tender rejections and spot rates in July, it's difficult
to see that that's played some type of truly macro
(08:37):
level meaningful role, because if it had, we would expect
to see, you know, drive in spot rates increasing substantially,
and we're just not seeing.
Speaker 2 (08:46):
That, gotcha.
Speaker 1 (08:46):
And then, you know, because you said it's mostly going
to be a demand driven but what's going on on
the supply side?
Speaker 3 (08:53):
Yeah, supply side right now? I mean new orders for
obviously Class AID equipment has been quite weak, which is
expect given where rates have been at combined with the
fact we had you know, tremendously strong orders and then
pent up demand the prior couple years. Normally, and I've
even published a paper on this, but you know, historically
(09:14):
it was always changed in spot rates, predicts change in
new orders, very very very sharply. That completely broke down
with the equipment shortages or the part shortages, which led
to construct production issues in twenty one and twenty two.
You know, twenty three was sort of the great production year,
you know, a year lagged from when the freight market
(09:36):
had turned down, and now we're kind of just experiencing
sort of the extended period of that. But you know,
right now, it's it's interesting times because we're still trying
to get a sense too of you know, what's going
to happen with the Section two thirty two tariffs on
heavy trucks that is under review, and what does that
(09:57):
mean for production in Mexico, you know, Canada, Mexico, but
especially Mexico. And so it's just it's times of uncertainty,
the greatest uncertainty since the pandemic. The difference is this
is self imposed uncertainty due to teriff related policies versus
the unknown of a disease that we were just trying
(10:18):
to understand, you know, what we were coping with.
Speaker 2 (10:21):
Are you following all the EPA mandates for trucking?
Speaker 3 (10:25):
Not too much? And I could be wrong on this,
but I believe there had been some rollbacks if I
think some.
Speaker 1 (10:31):
Of those, Yeah, I'm just curious if you're if you
had any thoughts about that, But we can we can
move on from there.
Speaker 3 (10:38):
I don't follow that one too much. I've assumed with
this administration that you're looking at a lot of more
environmentally oriented rules are going to be rolled back so
and otherwise I think if you were expecting something more
imminent to happen, you would see, just like we saw
in the mid two thousands, a surge of equipment orders
trying to get ahead of that.
Speaker 1 (10:58):
Gotcha, And can we, I guess, talk a little bit about,
you know, when do you think things are going to
get better? I mean, we both kind of agreed that
the recovery has been pushed off, but is this a
twenty twenty six event now?
Speaker 3 (11:15):
And it depends really on what happens between now and
eight to one and then figure seeing even what progresses
from A one. I think that a best case scenario
at this point is a Q two twenty twenty six recovery,
and that requires sort of threading a needle on the
(11:36):
tariff front, and you know certainly would not include as
an example an all out trade war breaking out between
the US and the EU. I mean, that's one we're
you know, waiting to see if some agreement can be
struck there. But I would say, at this point we've
missed peak home building season and twenty twenty five that's
(11:56):
kind of getting past us. So if we start thinking
about how the market could tighten. You're probably not going
to see anything significant until on November December, traditional holiday seasonality,
and even then we're likely pass sort of the traditional
peak import season because we kick in, you know, these
(12:16):
twenty percent rates for Vietnam, around twenty percent for a
lot of the rest of Southeast Asia. That's going to
curtail volume without a doubt. We you know, imports from
China are being tariff high enough, there's demand destruction taking
place there, so you're not going to have the traditional
peak season, which now means that once you get on
(12:39):
the other side of Christmas, we got the usual January
February slump that we always have happened with seasonality. So
the best you're hoping for is things tighten up in
twenty six if home construction increases. But that's going to
take i think the FED further cutting interest rates. But
it's also going to mean that there's no real signs
of tariff driven inflation. When I look at the data,
(13:02):
I see a few more red flags I think than
a lot of folks are saying. And that's just because
I'm looking very far upstream and I'm asking myself questions,
why is the price of domestically manufactured hardware, for motor vehicles,
for furniture, et cetera. Why is that up six percent
(13:23):
since the start of the year. Why are furniture prices
right now for domestically made furniture up almost three point
eight percent year over year when furniture demand is weak,
and that three point eight percent is quite historically strong
year over year increases. And my hunch is that once
we get some stability and tariff rates, and especially if
(13:44):
they're baseline fifteen, if not twenty percent, in a lot
of instances, you're going to have importers finally feeling confident
enough to go to their buyers and say, look, we
were absorbing ten, we can absorb twenty. We're passing some
of this on you, and the essentially this uncertainty is
resolved itself. And so I tend to think that we're
(14:07):
not really going to get a good picture on the
inflationary side of this until even September, October, November data
to give any type of sort of tariffs cementing themselves
and then start to see what further price increases are.
So I tend to think we're a long way away,
which means the FED may not be cutting rates even
(14:27):
twice this year, Maybe we're looking at one cut, and
potentially if some of the next CPI and especially PPI
readings don't look well, we may be in for a
zero cut scenario in twenty five unless the labor market
starts to really crack. And if the labor market cracks,
forget about it. At that point, we're entering a recession.
Speaker 2 (14:47):
Gotcha?
Speaker 1 (14:48):
And I mean, do you game out recessions that you
have a probability of that possibly happening.
Speaker 3 (14:55):
So I think the second half of this year is
probably fairly low. But again, the real question is what
happens with the EU trade deal at the moment. And
I'm also waiting to really see what the Section two
thirty two tariffs on semiconductors and derivatives entails, but also pharmaceuticals. Basically,
from an inflationary standpoint, if we see a fairly much
(15:17):
across the board, you know, twenty five or let's say
even fifty percent tariff on those items, that's going to
give the FED substantial pause for lowering interest rates, knowing
that that cost push inflation is going to be working
its way down to the ultimate end user level over
(15:38):
the next six to.
Speaker 1 (15:39):
Nine months, gotcha, Just as an Fai in the Bloomberg terminal,
the probability of recession right now is it thirty five percent.
That's down from forty percent a couple of weeks ago.
So economists that that Bloomberg polls, I guess are thinking
that the risk is a little lower still relatively, you know,
(16:00):
compared to where we were, you know, during the pandemic
and then all that stuff. So, uh, you know, it'll
be interesting to see how that that ends up playing out.
And you know it's interesting that you know, you you
I guess you're a little more I guess what do
you call pessimistic about inflation? So you don't think it's
you know, it's a dangerous where to use when explaining inflation,
(16:21):
but transitory like the rates are going to go up
because we all know what the towers are and then
they'll kind of stay steady from there. Do you think
it's going to be a continuation or do you think
it's going to be prices are going to have to
increase and they'll kind of stay there.
Speaker 3 (16:34):
So I mean, the I think so the question is is,
you know, if we think the steady goal is two percent,
is it a big one time shock and then it
returns slowly. I'm not convinced of that, and I think,
and part of that is so I take a little
bit of a different view on what happened in twenty
(16:55):
one and twenty two, I think, and you know where
how I view twenty one and twenty two is. And
this helps explain too. Globally, what we saw was you
had a combination of tremendous cost push inflation then, but
it was due to shortages of input shortages and materials
that was endemic in the US and in Europe from
(17:17):
different data sources. But then that cost push inflation got
coupled with very strong demand due to monetary policy as
well as fiscal policy, and so what you had was
a psychology where producers selling to wholesalers and retailers said, hey,
I can raise my prices because the demand's there. And
(17:39):
so then what happens is the tier one suppliers selling
the raw materials are saying, well, my costs are going up,
and hey, if you say you're just passing it on,
I feel comfortable passing it on. And so you start
getting the spiral. And if you look margins in twenty
one were absolutely phenomenal with this, and so you had
this combination of cost push and flotationary forces mixed with
(18:01):
really strong demand, and it gives you this nasty cycle.
And the FED finally broke it by raising interest rates
that cool demand that let the shortages get themselves addressed
and things sort of settled down. What we have today
is a potential cost push inflation. I'm going to phrase
it more potential in the form of the tariffs. But
(18:23):
what's keeping it in check to some degree is the
weak demand. And we can see that, for example, in
the automakers really absorbing a lot of the tariffs so far.
If you start lowering interest rates too much and demand
starts to pick back up, now all of our producers
and our importers who have been absorbing the costs say
(18:45):
I could pass this on a little bit more. And
so I think for me, that's the challenge that the
FED is trying to deal with. And so I think
any type of cut of interest rates is going to
fail that if it increases demand, it's going to fairly
quickly see importers start to say, hey, we're passing on
(19:06):
some of these tariff costs. If or demand situation improves,
and so I tend to be a little bit more
pessimistic on where I think things are, just because when
you look at the sectors that we should see inflation,
we are saying it it's just very far from where
the consumer is right now. And so from a fraid
(19:28):
demand standpoint, it's either if you're either pessimistic about inflation,
you're saying either inflation gets higher and that's not good,
or you say people are absorbing the tariffs and that's
not good from a capital investment standpoint, because the overwhelming
evidence is not that foreign exporters are absorbing a large
(19:51):
share of these tariffs. We can see it in some sectors.
I've written about it on LinkedIn. You can see it
in Chinese apparel, you can see it in EU beverage,
but you don't see it an EU machinery or Chinese machinery,
or sectors where the dynamics are very different.
Speaker 1 (20:05):
So going back to the supply side in trucking, and
this is going to be controversial within the trucking realm.
Speaker 2 (20:11):
And again, you know.
Speaker 1 (20:12):
The capacity is pretty loose right now, so it might
be silly to talk about, but do you think there's
a structural issue in trucking where there's always going to
be a quote unquote a driver shortage or if you
if you want to call it an issue with turnover.
Speaker 3 (20:30):
So what I would say is trucking has a turn
an endemic turnover problem. It does not have a structural
shortage of driver problems. And the way I like to
think about it is if you look and I'm going
to use pre COVID period because I think that's a
more realistic, normalish type of economic scenario, is take a
(20:52):
look at what happens between the for the twenty seventeen
through twenty nineteen market cycle. In twenty seventeen, and you
start to have demand really start to increase towards the
middle part to second part of the year. You've got
you know, fracking is coming back, business tax cuts, commodity
(21:13):
markets are doing well, so there's a lot more freight
to be moved. And then once freight demand starts to
go up, carriers can't add capacity that quickly, so you
start to see more carriers get towards full utilization, they
start to reject tenders that puts freight on the spot market.
Spot prices go up. We get a feeding frenzy, and
(21:34):
the only way to correct that is either contract rates
have to go up and then also at the same
time you need more capacity to enter, and that takes
six to nine months. But what always ends up happening
is by the time we get to Q four of
twenty eighteen, freight demand starts to decrease on a seasonally
adjusted basis. We've had interest rate cuts or interest rate
(21:57):
hikes starting to bite. You started to have retaliatory tariffs.
Bit it a little bit in response to our tariffs.
But payrolls keep going up through most of twenty nineteen
because capacity gets added with a lag, and so each
market cycle sort of exhibits this pattern. Is demand increases
more rapidly than we can add supply, just due to
(22:19):
the fact that there's adjustment costs with adding supply. But
supply always overshoots demand because demand for trucking is practically
perfectly priced inelastic. Yes, on the intermodal side, there's some
elasticity there to the three railroads keep rates too high.
As truckload rates go down, there'll be some market show.
But in general, Procter and Gamble doesn't care if it's
(22:41):
three dollars a mile two dollars a mile they're shipping
something by truck. On the other hand, supply is super
price elastic rates go up, supply gets added, but with
the lag, so there's no structural shortage of drivers. I
completely disagree with the ATA on that, and the fact
we've been and over a two and a half year
freight recession would sort of suggest there's not a structural
(23:04):
shortage of drivers. No, if somebody says, well, there's a
structural shortage of good drivers, there's a structural shortage of
good everything. So I don't buy that argument whatsoever. But
on the turnover side, certainly turnover rates are quite high
compared to let's say manufacturing, and what that means is
for carriers, even if it's a down market like it's
(23:25):
been for the last two years, I'm still constantly hiring people. Still.
I may not even be trying to grow, I'm just
trying to maintain capacity. I'm still having to hire people
all the time. And so I think folks conflate the
I'm always hiring folks because of turnover with the concept
of a shortage, and they're two completely different things in economics.
Speaker 1 (23:48):
Right, And for those listening, you know, driver Turnover tends
to be high in trucking because it's obviously a pretty
fungible job. If you get pissed off at your dispatcher
at one company, you just might go down the road
and work for a different company. Also, a lot of
people get into trucking. It's usually a second or third
career for them. They think, hey, I'm going to go
see the country, and then they realize it's an extremely
(24:12):
tough profession because you're always on the road, you're you know,
living out of your truck. Obviously, it's an incredibly important
aspect of our economy and without it, most of us
would not have the things that we enjoy every day,
whether it's your I don't know, your beer, your avocados,
or your pillows. I don't know why I chose those
(24:32):
three things. But you know, it is a tough job,
and it's interesting. You know, we have data on the
Bloomberg Terminal from the American Trucking Association, and you know,
one of their data points is turnover at large truckload
providers and that's historically low, and it's historically low at
seventy percent, So we can go above one hundred percent
(24:57):
during really good times so turn over is something that
you know, we kind of look at when we're trying
to figure out what's going on in the trucking market.
Speaker 2 (25:07):
What else is.
Speaker 1 (25:08):
Kind of like a major challenge for the trucking industry?
Do you cover or look at like, you know, these
nuclear verdicts that we've been seeing as of late, Is
that something that you look at.
Speaker 3 (25:22):
I haven't really looked at it that much from a
research standpoint, but it is certainly a topic. I think
in general this even broader issue as well. We keep
seeing cases on broker liability, and especially since a lot
of the big truckload players are also brokerages, that's going
(25:42):
to be a topic that's increasingly important. And the sort
of the vicarious liability aspects of that, what is due
diligence entail? You know, I published a paperback in twenty
twenty where I had argued essentially that we know very
well from the distributions of like the safety scores published
(26:04):
from the Compliance, Safety and Accountability Program by the Federal
Motorcare Safety Administration, I can give you pretty rough guidelines
onto Hey, if a carrier's safety performance is above xyz
threshold on these metrics, you probably don't want to use them,
and so that's something I'll be I'll be curious to
(26:25):
see as the industry continues to become more and more
and more data focused, you know, whether we start to
see you know, carrier selection and whatnot start to incorporate
more of you know, more above the minimum requirements that
FMCSA stipulates that must be used. Is firms try to
(26:48):
essentially avoid these issues. I think the challenges during a
down market it's easier to be very selective. But what
happens when the market turns and then folks are you know,
looking for capacity. You tend to be more willing to
take rest during that time period, right right?
Speaker 1 (27:05):
You have you know, insurance costs and fraud or really
big issues facing the trucking industry. Can we talk about
technology a little bit? You know, what are your views
on AI machine learning? Are you foreigner against it?
Speaker 2 (27:21):
Now? You know what do you think that fits in
with trucking?
Speaker 3 (27:25):
So I think where it fits in very well. And
again this is especially going to be the very large firms.
If you're running a fleet of five trucks, you don't
need this stuff, right, I mean, you probably have a
very sort of stable network you've got a couple anchor shippers.
You can run this operation still on post and notes
with four or five trucks. And that's why a lot
(27:46):
of carriers stay small. They find their niche, they don't
want to get out of it. They don't want to
grow because it's a managerial nightmare, and so for those
firms really don't matter. For the big players, it's going
to just be a general extension of all the analytics
work that we've seen over the years. I mean, you know,
you look at carriers like Schneider has worked a lot with,
(28:06):
you know, Warren Powell when meritus professor from Princeton in
terms of optimization and things like that. It'll just be
even further and further and further improvement in terms of
finding efficiencies in the system. I mean, h Robinson has
been very public about their use of AI to automate
(28:28):
essentially fairly drudgery processes. They get an email asking for
a freight quote, and they can just now have AI
trained to say, hey, here you go, here's what it is.
Because the machine can read it, put the information in
their quoting tool, and it just basically sends an email
back with what the quoting tool tells it, so I
think it'll make further improvements. But I tend to be
(28:51):
a believer in sort of the great innovations thesis, which
is as transportation. If we think about it, the movement
from you know, mules to railroads was a phenomenal exponential
increase in efficiency, and then you could get rail to
(29:11):
truck for certain select movements that was more efficiency, but
the magnitude of that change is far less. I tend
to think for a lot of application specific to trucking.
At the end of the day, unless you get self
driving vehicles, which I think we're very far away from,
AI doesn't change the fundamental what the economists would call
(29:33):
production technology of the truckload sector. It's still about hauling
freight from point A to point B. There's tremendous randomness
in the generation of freight combined with where it's going
to go, and it's all about those economies. The scope
of you know, essentially building connected load chains to go
(29:53):
from A to B, B, two C, C to D
back to A with as minimal downtime as you can
within the concer trains posed by our service regulation. To
the extent, AI makes it better to do that you
may have some more efficiencies, but it's a lot more
incremental potentially than you know, other changes that we may
(30:15):
have had twenty five thirty years ago, where we start
getting combinatorial optimization that can you know, determine how shippers
allocate freight two carriers.
Speaker 1 (30:25):
Yeah, just going back to the comments you made about
h Robinson for those interested in a couple of weeks ago,
we've published a podcast with they've both been the CEO
of Robinson, and he talks a lot about AI and
how they're leveraging technologies. So to self promote, I would
go back and listen to that if I were you.
(30:45):
And so, you know, you mentioned something about autonomous trucking.
It doesn't seem like you're a true believer, at least
not a true believer that it's going to happen tomorrow.
Can you talk about kind of your reservations about, you know,
why you think it's maybe something that's more future teristic
than today.
Speaker 3 (31:03):
So I'd say, first off, drivers do a lot more
than just drive. Their security. They can fix problems when
they happen on the road, So drivers are not just
there to drive, and so you're still going to need
a vehicle with a lot, or you're still going to
need a person accompanying a lot. Drivers take pride in
(31:26):
how they were drive. My dad was a driver for
four years in the eighties, so I come from having
a parent that was in this sector. He primarily hauled
steel coils as a subcontractors, so he was the least
owner operator. Drivers take tremendous pride in their capabilities and
how they drive. No driver actually wants to really babysit
a computer. That is not what they want to do,
(31:49):
and so that is a human element of this that
I don't think is being recognized enough. The other issue
is just in general, only a subset of carrying are
really going to be able to use this technology. It's
going to be your JB Hunter Schneider's where there's a
lot of dedicated capacity for relatively short distance halls. So
(32:09):
I believe JBH is dedicated to vision. The average length
to hall is something like one hundred and fifty to
one hundred and sixty months, so it's it's quite short,
and so it's consistent freight to and from major metro areas.
You're going to need that type of sort of consistency
to justify the higher unit cost of the equipment for
(32:31):
small carriers, which actually today can consider or constitute more
of the industry from a relative standpoint than they did
a decade ago. Small carriers are not going to really
want this technology because their networks don't justify it. But
also you run into the proverbial issue of if my
(32:52):
equipment's down, I now have a higher fixed cost that
I'm having to absorb. It's why a lot of restaurants,
if I'm a all franchisee, the thought of a robot
flipping Hamburgers may sound great until somebody says, well, what
if the robot breaks, right, and then what do you do?
That's I think the type of situation you're looking at
(33:14):
as well, because think about as an autonomous system rolls out,
fixing it when it breaks, and it will break is
going to be much more challenging, and so for a
small firm, you're not going to want to go with that.
And so I certainly think there will be applications, But
if we look at the nature of freight, we're not
(33:35):
I don't see ten years from now the vast majority
of trucks being autonomous that that's just not going to happen.
Speaker 1 (33:41):
Yeah, I totally agree with you, and I think the
most interesting thing about the autonomous technologies is that they
are going to make trucks safer for trucks with drivers
in them, because that technology will really really help things along.
So a little bit little truck humor there for those listening.
(34:04):
You know, I know you do all transports. I know
you do focus on trucking, but you know, I'd love
to hear your thoughts about, you know, the potential for
a Union Pacific Norfolk Southern merger, which is you know,
today UP announced that they are in fact having advanced
talks with Norfolk Southern. So what are your thoughts about
a deal? Do you think a deal can get done
(34:26):
if you do have a thought on that, given that
you know there's a high regulatory hurdle there.
Speaker 3 (34:31):
Yeah, So what I would say is, I'm not going
to speculate on whether the deal will get approved by
you know, let's say the STV YEP. But what I
can say is that combination and I really hadn't appreciated
it till I actually looked at the twenty twenty four
data on rail movements by commodity, and that's when you
realize like this is a monster if this gets created.
(34:55):
So I mean, just to give some statistics, if you
use twenty twenty four US movements, I'm gonna call it UPNS.
I don't know why, I just like the sound of
that better than NSUP. So UPNS would be have forty
three percent of all movements, that's all containers, all car loads,
all truck trailers. BNSF would be a distant second at
(35:18):
that point at twenty seven percent. And for some commodity categories,
for example chemicals, UPNS would have forty nine percent market
share of chemical movements in the US. Now, outside of COLE,
that is your largest carload commodity by a long shot.
CSX is a distant second place at eighteen percent. For
(35:42):
motor vehicles and equipment, UPNS has forty seven percent market
share behind CSX again is a distant second place at
twenty three percent. Even for intermodal containers, so not even
including truck trailers, just intermodal containers, UPNS is forty six
percent market share after BNSF and BNSF is second and
(36:05):
just thirty percent. So you would just have an absolute
monster doing over fifteen million movements a year. And so
I do think one of the challenges is if this
merger were to happen, it puts some pressure on CSX
and BNSF because now, all of a sudden, you have
(36:26):
one integrated monster that each of them is now facing
as their core rival and their respective parts of the country.
Speaker 1 (36:34):
Yeah, and you know, as as his deal progresses, I
would not be surprised if Ben and CSX announced their
own kind of merger because to your point, they'd be
at a competitive disadvantage.
Speaker 2 (36:48):
And the rules that were established by.
Speaker 1 (36:50):
The STB in twenty two thousand and one were really
driven to kind of stop the mergers of large class
one rail So it'll be interesting to see a if
those rules continue, because the STB is having some hearings
in August about, you know, what they can do to
streamline their regulatory process, So it'll be interesting to see
(37:10):
if that includes the kind of rules around M and A.
So you know, you're in academia, which is awesome, What
do you is there a book about transportation that you
know you tell your students like you gotta read this
for and not like a textbook, like just a book
about transportation fiction or nonfiction.
Speaker 3 (37:32):
So certainly for Trucking by far the book I always
make any doctoral student read if they're going to get
into trucking as a book but called Pedal to the
Metal by Lawrence Uhlett. It's from nineteen ninety four. Ulett
is a interestingly enough a sociology professor, but he was
a truck driver for much of the eighties, and so
(37:56):
he tells his stories of working for MOULDI pulled different firms,
and he brings such a unique angle to it as
a sociologist. He talks about why do truck drivers work
so hard? Because every economic theory would say, why would
they work hard? They're working away from direct management oversight,
and we're talking in nineteen eighties. Computers were very, very
(38:20):
very rare at that point in time, and so he
just has such a fascinating perspective on the industry. And
that was what really sort of got me into doing
a lot of the research that I ended up doing,
because it turned out that trucking is one sector where
there's a lot of data available, but it has just
got such unique dynamics that take place that it really
(38:45):
interested me. So that is for me, like the all time,
by far best book on that. I'd say for anybody
who's interested in trucking and is kind of curious about
like electronic logs and things like that. Karen Levy has
a great book called Data Driven that's a good read
(39:07):
in terms of sort of that she went out did
a lot of ethnographic work talking to carriers, talking to
drivers about how electronic log shape things. And so her
work's interesting because myself and some of my colleagues have
so far to date published every paper on the impact
of the electronic logging devices as well as factors that
(39:28):
were affecting carriers adoption of it, And so for me
as a statistician, it's interesting to see sort of that
grant you know, more you know, field interview ethnographic type
of work that really sort of corroborates what we're seeing
when we look at sort of these broader statistical associations
(39:48):
that emerge.
Speaker 1 (39:49):
And you know, we mentioned obviously social media earlier that
you're you know, you're pretty prolific on LinkedIn. Are there
people in transportation that you follow on social media?
Speaker 2 (40:00):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (40:00):
Besides me, of course, so some other folks who I
really like the content they put out. Ken adamo At
dat Sure. Ken puts out some great stuff. And what
I appreciate about Ken is he's willing to, you know, again,
what the data. As much as data can't speak for itself,
you still have to provide the interpretation, but he's willing
(40:22):
to say, here's the data, here's my interpretation. This is
very broad representative. A lot of you may disagree with this,
you know, particularly for example, this idea of the requirement
that brokers have to give truck you know, truckload carriers
information about the pricing and the margin and all of this.
(40:43):
I've been on the record saying it doesn't matter for
a small carrier whether you get this information or not,
because no offense, that gigantic shipper doesn't want to deal
with you directly, You're not going to disintermediate the broker
from this relationship. But so Ken Ken does some great stuff.
Thomas Watson at Freight Waves puts out some really good
(41:07):
analyzes and charts using their sonar program. He focuses a
lot on uh, you know, kind of current state of
the market as well. So it's always nice, you know,
I work a lot using dat's publicly available data, but
it's nice to see you know, corroborating information from different sources.
(41:28):
So I usually really like to give his stuff a
look as well. And then for anybody if you're interested
in like the tariff and trade space, I got to
give a shout out to Richard Baldwin, another fellow academic
across the pond who's phenomenal on that trade space. But
(41:48):
he has a very unique and I think sophisticated way
of really looking at the complexities of the tariffs. You know,
for example, writing an article just the other day about
the Japanese tariffs and really highlighting some of the challenges
in the potentially of fifteen percent tariff on finished Japanese
(42:11):
vehicles may actually mean that when the dust settles, a
fifteen percent tariff finished Japanese vehicle in Japan is actually
now more competitive in the United States than a US
assembled vehicle because of all the swede of tariffs. So
essentially on a relative basis, are we maybe, actually, you know,
(42:33):
with policies like that, inadvertently making ourselves less competitive? And
what are the complexities if Japan If Japanese automakers shift
some sourcing from Mexico back to Japan, for I shouldn't
say sourcing, shift assembly back to Japan, are they actually
(42:53):
better off now exporting from Japan to the US market,
and that hurts US autoparts maker who are actually supplying
to those plants in Mexico but wouldn't supply to the
plants in Japan.
Speaker 1 (43:05):
That sounds a very interesting paper.
Speaker 2 (43:08):
I gotta I gotta take a look at that.
Speaker 3 (43:10):
Oh yeah, yeah, And Richard does a great job and
not again kind of writing for a general audience versus
you know. The one thing for anybody listening to understand
is US academics. If we write complexly, we apologize, but
you should read what we actually write to each other
in the form of peer reviewed papers. They are for
the average person completely unintelligible. We always tell our doctoral
(43:35):
students once they start doing things, it's going to take
you eighteen months till you can actually really read and
understand one of these things. And so, you know, it's
it's interesting to see I think more academics becoming more
involved on social media. I'm another another person, my friend Yao, Jen,
(43:57):
I mean goes by Henry at Miami of Ohio does
a lot of really good, you know, charts out of
Fred just trying to you know, again, trying to put
a better sense and understanding of what's going on.
Speaker 1 (44:08):
And for those interested, we did a podcast with Ken
I think last year from DAT so you might want
to go take a look at.
Speaker 2 (44:16):
A past episode.
Speaker 1 (44:18):
And just I guess before I let you go and
wrap things up here because we're coming towards the the
end of our time. You know, I guess, how did
you first gravitate towards transports, you know, with your with
your studies. How did you say, like, you know, this
is this is what I want to do.
Speaker 3 (44:37):
Yeah, So it was a combination of good timing and whatnot.
So one of my he became one of my dissertation mentors,
John Sildona. He's the Sears endowed share at the University
of West Virginia now, but he had been at Ohio
State at the time, and this would have been twenty eleven,
twenty twelve, and they had just done a massive survey
(44:59):
about organizational control mechanisms in the trucking industry, collecting data
on monitoring technologies can use you know, use of different
incentives turnover, et cetera. And that was right when the
Compliance Safety and Accountability Program had just rolled out and
was publishing all of this data on care safety and
(45:20):
I knew of that, and I'd said, well, John, trucking
is an interesting setting, there's a safety data. Why don't
we merge this together and this will be my dissertation,
and that senate what I ended up doing. And then
once I had went down that rabbit hole, started to
do a lot of research on you know, how did
(45:41):
carrier safety evolve following the CSA program, what factors affected that?
And then I ended up getting really involved more in
the productivity and market side thanks to would have been
a doctoral student at the time of Michigan State, a
gentleman named Bill Muir, who I always tremendous amount of
gratitude too for really opening my eyes to a lot
(46:04):
of the connection between supply chain and economics, and so
kind of one thing led to another. When the ELD
mandate then started to hit, I'd reached out to Kevin Hill,
a carrierless which was eventually bought by Highway, after I
saw him cited in Wall Street Journal about this survey
on trucker the extent carriers were becoming compliant with ELD
(46:28):
mat date and said, hey, I'm an academic, you want
partner on those? And he goes sure, here's the data.
And so we've published some papers off that and then
working with my colleagues and a lot of you know,
really understanding the eld mandate not only the initial effects
but longer term. And you know, it's kind of one
of those you almost diversify as an academic the same
way companies do. You typically start narrow with a line
(46:51):
of business, you get to know that well, you start
to see areas of overlap and other lines of business,
and you sort of diversify yourself out that way.
Speaker 1 (46:59):
Gotcha, all right, great stuff, and Jason, I really appreciate
your time and your insights today. Thanks so much for
joining us on Talking Transports.
Speaker 3 (47:06):
Hey, thanks for having me Lee, and.
Speaker 2 (47:08):
I want to thank you for tuning in.
Speaker 1 (47:09):
If you liked the episode, please subscribe.
Speaker 2 (47:11):
And leave a review.
Speaker 1 (47:13):
We have lined up a number of great guests for
the podcast, so please check back to hear conversations with
C suite executives, shippers, regulators, and decision makers within the
freight markets. Also, if you want to learn more about
the freight transportation markets, check out our work on the
Bloomberg Terminal at BIGO and on social media. This is
(47:33):
Lee Clasgow signing off and thanks for talking transports with me,
Hi everyone, this is Lee Clasgow when We're Talking Transports.
Welcome to Bloomberg Intelligence Talking Transports podcast. I'm your host,
Lee Clascaw, senior freight, transportation and logistics analysts at Bloomberg Intelligence,
Bloomberg's in house research arm of almost five hundred analysts
and strategists around the world before diving in little public
service announcement. Your support is instrumental to keep bringing great
(00:28):
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Speaker 2 (00:36):
Also, if you have any ideas.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
For a future episode or just want to talk transports,
please set me up on the Bloomberg terminal and on
LinkedIn or on Twitter at logistics Late. Now on to
our episode. I'm very excited to have Jason Miller with
us today. A professor in supply chain management at Michigan
State University's Eli Broad College of Business. He researches topics
(00:58):
at the intersection of apply chain management and economics, with
a special focus on the for hire trucking industry in
the United States. Welcome to the podcast, Jason.
Speaker 3 (01:09):
Hey, thanks so much for having Melee.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
It is it doctor Jason, doctor Miller.
Speaker 3 (01:13):
I can just go by Jason. I am super informal
with that title.
Speaker 1 (01:17):
All right, all right, and people that you know this
is an audio podcast, unfortunately, and they can't enjoy your mustache.
Speaker 2 (01:23):
That is one hell of a mustache.
Speaker 3 (01:25):
And you know, the funny story with that was when
I became interim chairperson of my department. You know, I
would get comments about looking too young, and I used
to have a full beard. I had shaved that off
with COVID, so I went from looking like a lumberjack
to kind of looking like maybe a non traditional undergrad.
(01:46):
And then I'm like, Okay, well I don't want to
have the itchy beard. So the mustache made its appearance.
Speaker 1 (01:51):
We'll keep on rocking and it looks good. Can you
talk a little bit about Michigan State Universal's logistics program.
Speaker 3 (01:57):
Yeah. So we're one of the oldest sort of integrated
supply chain programs. The program was sort of formally rebranded
supply chain back in the mid two thousands. We graduate
about three hundred and fifty undergraduates each year, making us
one of the larger programs. Very good job placement rates,
(02:18):
starting salaries around seventy thousand dollars and we are the
number one rank program now for over a decade in
a row at the undergraduate level by US News and
World Report. At the graduate level, we have a specialized
Masters of Science and Supply Chain Management program I teach
in that's aimed really at working professionals with multiple years
(02:41):
of experience, so really get the opportunity to go in
depth with folks who are in the trenches. Currently, we're
a big part of our MBA program. We have two
PhD programs in the department, and then our most recent
edition is what's called a Graduate Certificate and Supply Chain
(03:03):
Management that is aimed for folks who are out of
undergrad may have found themselves in a supply chain role
and they really want to get a fairly quick you know,
grounding and basis. Or for folks who majored in something
that they're not finding much job market success and they
need something to improve their job market chances.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
Right, and if you give out any honorary degrees, I
would love to add that to my resume.
Speaker 3 (03:28):
So that's a university central and I don't even know
how that whole process work.
Speaker 2 (03:34):
All right, Let's get down to business.
Speaker 1 (03:36):
So you know, like like I did in the intro,
you kind of talk about the cross section of logistics
in the economy. I know you're very focused on the
trucking industry, and you're well published, and you're very active
on social media and I love reading your posts. Just
for a little plug, where can people like find your
stuff outside of the university where you want?
Speaker 2 (03:55):
Are you on x?
Speaker 3 (03:56):
LinkedIn is primarily where I put everything, just because I
need that longer format to really start getting getting in
enough enough depth that it's interesting for me as an academic,
but it's also not too in depth to where the
average you know, person and industry is going to say, Okay,
this is this isn't for me.
Speaker 1 (04:16):
I recommend anyone that's listening to follow Jason on LinkedIn.
So what are you working on now? Like I'm assuming
you're you're looking deep into the rate cycle and to
demand kind of what are your takeaways on the state
of the North America trucking market?
Speaker 3 (04:32):
You know, right now, my general sense is we're really
sort of continuing to be stalled out on that. I'm
going to say, drive in truckload space. You know, if
you look outside of regular seasonal fluctuations, line haul spot
rates per dat haven't really budged much since Q one
of twenty twenty three. We've seen our usual tightening that
(04:54):
we'll see in June, in the midsummer, and then in
November and December. But certainly this year has been a
disappointment from my standpoint. When I you know, when I
did some writing back last December and was sort of
making a twenty twenty five forecast, I was anticipating a
much more bullish scenario. We at that point in time
(05:16):
and had one hundred basis points of interest rate cuts.
We were expecting that to flow through into construction and
capital investment. And it just seems that the tariffs, and
possibly even more important, that uncertainty surrounding tariffs, has just
sort of deflated that potential freight balloon. And I mean,
if you take a look, for example, June, single family
(05:38):
housing starts are down ten percent year over year twenty
five versus twenty four. And I don't think anybody that
you would have talked to, you know, seven eight months ago,
would have anticipated behavior like that.
Speaker 1 (05:50):
And you know, in the beginning of the year, we
were pretty optimistic about where the truck and market was
going to go. You know, we thought rates could get
contractual rates can increase by high single digits, maybe even
low double digits, and that's obviously been rained in considerably given.
Speaker 2 (06:06):
Where we are.
Speaker 1 (06:07):
So I guess from your standpoint, is it more or
less the policies out of Washington that are limiting where
trucking's going or is there something else that play there
that's just getting exasperated by what's going on in Washington.
Speaker 3 (06:23):
Now, I would really say it is the policies from Washington.
And you know, when I look so some of the
indicators I really look at that have been historically fairly
good predictors of where the trucking cycles are going to go.
It's especially like the Institute for Supply Managements PMI for
manufacturing new orders, as well as sort of an aggregate
(06:44):
new orders index that I put together from the five
Fed banks that report PMI type manufacturing surveys. And if
you take a look for all of those, just as
you mentioned, December January, and even to some extent in February,
we were starting to see new orders move solidly back
into expansion territory for the first time since really early
(07:06):
Q two of twenty twenty two, believe it or not,
and that just did a U turn by March. April
was quite rough. May and June were maybe a little better,
but still in contraction. July right now, from what we've seen,
is at most kind of neutral. And you can just
trace all of that to the tariff shocks that we've experienced,
(07:31):
and it seems to be really sort of that curtail
of capital investment activity, that curtail of single family construction,
and without that additional essentially freight you know, demand shock,
it just you can't start pushing carriers towards that upper
level of capacity utilization where they're starting to routinely, you know,
(07:54):
reject tenders putting the freight on the spot market to
get that cycle going, and so on. One area where
I differ from you know, sort of others in the
industry is look, for me, looking back at the data,
it sort of bullish. Cycles and trucking are always to
me about demand. Supply factors are very much secondary, Whereas
(08:16):
I think we've had so many conversations about this belief
that okay, low spot rates are going to lead to
even more attrition to capacity, or the most recent was
the English language proficiency is going to result in this
massive drop of capacity, and certainly, looking at the behavior
of tender rejections and spot rates in July, it's difficult
to see that that's played some type of truly macro
(08:37):
level meaningful role, because if it had, we would expect
to see, you know, drive in spot rates increasing substantially,
and we're just not seeing.
Speaker 2 (08:46):
That, gotcha.
Speaker 1 (08:46):
And then, you know, because you said it's mostly going
to be a demand driven but what's going on on
the supply side?
Speaker 3 (08:53):
Yeah, supply side right now? I mean new orders for
obviously Class AID equipment has been quite weak, which is
expect given where rates have been at combined with the
fact we had you know, tremendously strong orders and then
pent up demand the prior couple years. Normally, and I've
even published a paper on this, but you know, historically
(09:14):
it was always changed in spot rates, predicts change in
new orders, very very very sharply. That completely broke down
with the equipment shortages or the part shortages, which led
to construct production issues in twenty one and twenty two.
You know, twenty three was sort of the great production year,
you know, a year lagged from when the freight market
(09:36):
had turned down, and now we're kind of just experiencing
sort of the extended period of that. But you know,
right now, it's it's interesting times because we're still trying
to get a sense too of you know, what's going
to happen with the Section two thirty two tariffs on
heavy trucks that is under review, and what does that
(09:57):
mean for production in Mexico, you know, Canada, Mexico, but
especially Mexico. And so it's just it's times of uncertainty,
the greatest uncertainty since the pandemic. The difference is this
is self imposed uncertainty due to teriff related policies versus
the unknown of a disease that we were just trying
(10:18):
to understand, you know, what we were coping with.
Speaker 2 (10:21):
Are you following all the EPA mandates for trucking?
Speaker 3 (10:25):
Not too much? And I could be wrong on this,
but I believe there had been some rollbacks if I
think some.
Speaker 1 (10:31):
Of those, Yeah, I'm just curious if you're if you
had any thoughts about that, But we can we can
move on from there.
Speaker 3 (10:38):
I don't follow that one too much. I've assumed with
this administration that you're looking at a lot of more
environmentally oriented rules are going to be rolled back so
and otherwise I think if you were expecting something more
imminent to happen, you would see, just like we saw
in the mid two thousands, a surge of equipment orders
trying to get ahead of that.
Speaker 1 (10:58):
Gotcha, And can we, I guess, talk a little bit about,
you know, when do you think things are going to
get better? I mean, we both kind of agreed that
the recovery has been pushed off, but is this a
twenty twenty six event now?
Speaker 3 (11:15):
And it depends really on what happens between now and
eight to one and then figure seeing even what progresses
from A one. I think that a best case scenario
at this point is a Q two twenty twenty six recovery,
and that requires sort of threading a needle on the
(11:36):
tariff front, and you know certainly would not include as
an example an all out trade war breaking out between
the US and the EU. I mean, that's one we're
you know, waiting to see if some agreement can be
struck there. But I would say, at this point we've
missed peak home building season and twenty twenty five that's
(11:56):
kind of getting past us. So if we start thinking
about how the market could tighten. You're probably not going
to see anything significant until on November December, traditional holiday seasonality,
and even then we're likely pass sort of the traditional
peak import season because we kick in, you know, these
(12:16):
twenty percent rates for Vietnam, around twenty percent for a
lot of the rest of Southeast Asia. That's going to
curtail volume without a doubt. We you know, imports from
China are being tariff high enough, there's demand destruction taking
place there, so you're not going to have the traditional
peak season, which now means that once you get on
(12:39):
the other side of Christmas, we got the usual January
February slump that we always have happened with seasonality. So
the best you're hoping for is things tighten up in
twenty six if home construction increases. But that's going to
take i think the FED further cutting interest rates. But
it's also going to mean that there's no real signs
of tariff driven inflation. When I look at the data,
(13:02):
I see a few more red flags I think than
a lot of folks are saying. And that's just because
I'm looking very far upstream and I'm asking myself questions,
why is the price of domestically manufactured hardware, for motor vehicles,
for furniture, et cetera. Why is that up six percent
(13:23):
since the start of the year. Why are furniture prices
right now for domestically made furniture up almost three point
eight percent year over year when furniture demand is weak,
and that three point eight percent is quite historically strong
year over year increases. And my hunch is that once
we get some stability and tariff rates, and especially if
(13:44):
they're baseline fifteen, if not twenty percent, in a lot
of instances, you're going to have importers finally feeling confident
enough to go to their buyers and say, look, we
were absorbing ten, we can absorb twenty. We're passing some
of this on you, and the essentially this uncertainty is
resolved itself. And so I tend to think that we're
(14:07):
not really going to get a good picture on the
inflationary side of this until even September, October, November data
to give any type of sort of tariffs cementing themselves
and then start to see what further price increases are.
So I tend to think we're a long way away,
which means the FED may not be cutting rates even
(14:27):
twice this year, Maybe we're looking at one cut, and
potentially if some of the next CPI and especially PPI
readings don't look well, we may be in for a
zero cut scenario in twenty five unless the labor market
starts to really crack. And if the labor market cracks,
forget about it. At that point, we're entering a recession.
Speaker 2 (14:47):
Gotcha?
Speaker 1 (14:48):
And I mean, do you game out recessions that you
have a probability of that possibly happening.
Speaker 3 (14:55):
So I think the second half of this year is
probably fairly low. But again, the real question is what
happens with the EU trade deal at the moment. And
I'm also waiting to really see what the Section two
thirty two tariffs on semiconductors and derivatives entails, but also pharmaceuticals. Basically,
from an inflationary standpoint, if we see a fairly much
(15:17):
across the board, you know, twenty five or let's say
even fifty percent tariff on those items, that's going to
give the FED substantial pause for lowering interest rates, knowing
that that cost push inflation is going to be working
its way down to the ultimate end user level over
(15:38):
the next six to.
Speaker 1 (15:39):
Nine months, gotcha, Just as an Fai in the Bloomberg terminal,
the probability of recession right now is it thirty five percent.
That's down from forty percent a couple of weeks ago.
So economists that that Bloomberg polls, I guess are thinking
that the risk is a little lower still relatively, you know,
(16:00):
compared to where we were, you know, during the pandemic
and then all that stuff. So, uh, you know, it'll
be interesting to see how that that ends up playing out.
And you know it's interesting that you know, you you
I guess you're a little more I guess what do
you call pessimistic about inflation? So you don't think it's
you know, it's a dangerous where to use when explaining inflation,
(16:21):
but transitory like the rates are going to go up
because we all know what the towers are and then
they'll kind of stay steady from there. Do you think
it's going to be a continuation or do you think
it's going to be prices are going to have to
increase and they'll kind of stay there.
Speaker 3 (16:34):
So I mean, the I think so the question is is,
you know, if we think the steady goal is two percent,
is it a big one time shock and then it
returns slowly. I'm not convinced of that, and I think,
and part of that is so I take a little
bit of a different view on what happened in twenty
(16:55):
one and twenty two, I think, and you know where
how I view twenty one and twenty two is. And
this helps explain too. Globally, what we saw was you
had a combination of tremendous cost push inflation then, but
it was due to shortages of input shortages and materials
that was endemic in the US and in Europe from
(17:17):
different data sources. But then that cost push inflation got
coupled with very strong demand due to monetary policy as
well as fiscal policy, and so what you had was
a psychology where producers selling to wholesalers and retailers said, hey,
I can raise my prices because the demand's there. And
(17:39):
so then what happens is the tier one suppliers selling
the raw materials are saying, well, my costs are going up,
and hey, if you say you're just passing it on,
I feel comfortable passing it on. And so you start
getting the spiral. And if you look margins in twenty
one were absolutely phenomenal with this, and so you had
this combination of cost push and flotationary forces mixed with
(18:01):
really strong demand, and it gives you this nasty cycle.
And the FED finally broke it by raising interest rates
that cool demand that let the shortages get themselves addressed
and things sort of settled down. What we have today
is a potential cost push inflation. I'm going to phrase
it more potential in the form of the tariffs. But
(18:23):
what's keeping it in check to some degree is the
weak demand. And we can see that, for example, in
the automakers really absorbing a lot of the tariffs so far.
If you start lowering interest rates too much and demand
starts to pick back up, now all of our producers
and our importers who have been absorbing the costs say
(18:45):
I could pass this on a little bit more. And
so I think for me, that's the challenge that the
FED is trying to deal with. And so I think
any type of cut of interest rates is going to
fail that if it increases demand, it's going to fairly
quickly see importers start to say, hey, we're passing on
(19:06):
some of these tariff costs. If or demand situation improves,
and so I tend to be a little bit more
pessimistic on where I think things are, just because when
you look at the sectors that we should see inflation,
we are saying it it's just very far from where
the consumer is right now. And so from a fraid
(19:28):
demand standpoint, it's either if you're either pessimistic about inflation,
you're saying either inflation gets higher and that's not good,
or you say people are absorbing the tariffs and that's
not good from a capital investment standpoint, because the overwhelming
evidence is not that foreign exporters are absorbing a large
(19:51):
share of these tariffs. We can see it in some sectors.
I've written about it on LinkedIn. You can see it
in Chinese apparel, you can see it in EU beverage,
but you don't see it an EU machinery or Chinese machinery,
or sectors where the dynamics are very different.
Speaker 1 (20:05):
So going back to the supply side in trucking, and
this is going to be controversial within the trucking realm.
Speaker 2 (20:11):
And again, you know.
Speaker 1 (20:12):
The capacity is pretty loose right now, so it might
be silly to talk about, but do you think there's
a structural issue in trucking where there's always going to
be a quote unquote a driver shortage or if you
if you want to call it an issue with turnover.
Speaker 3 (20:30):
So what I would say is trucking has a turn
an endemic turnover problem. It does not have a structural
shortage of driver problems. And the way I like to
think about it is if you look and I'm going
to use pre COVID period because I think that's a
more realistic, normalish type of economic scenario, is take a
(20:52):
look at what happens between the for the twenty seventeen
through twenty nineteen market cycle. In twenty seventeen, and you
start to have demand really start to increase towards the
middle part to second part of the year. You've got
you know, fracking is coming back, business tax cuts, commodity
(21:13):
markets are doing well, so there's a lot more freight
to be moved. And then once freight demand starts to
go up, carriers can't add capacity that quickly, so you
start to see more carriers get towards full utilization, they
start to reject tenders that puts freight on the spot market.
Spot prices go up. We get a feeding frenzy, and
(21:34):
the only way to correct that is either contract rates
have to go up and then also at the same
time you need more capacity to enter, and that takes
six to nine months. But what always ends up happening
is by the time we get to Q four of
twenty eighteen, freight demand starts to decrease on a seasonally
adjusted basis. We've had interest rate cuts or interest rate
(21:57):
hikes starting to bite. You started to have retaliatory tariffs.
Bit it a little bit in response to our tariffs.
But payrolls keep going up through most of twenty nineteen
because capacity gets added with a lag, and so each
market cycle sort of exhibits this pattern. Is demand increases
more rapidly than we can add supply, just due to
(22:19):
the fact that there's adjustment costs with adding supply. But
supply always overshoots demand because demand for trucking is practically
perfectly priced inelastic. Yes, on the intermodal side, there's some
elasticity there to the three railroads keep rates too high.
As truckload rates go down, there'll be some market show.
But in general, Procter and Gamble doesn't care if it's
(22:41):
three dollars a mile two dollars a mile they're shipping
something by truck. On the other hand, supply is super
price elastic rates go up, supply gets added, but with
the lag, so there's no structural shortage of drivers. I
completely disagree with the ATA on that, and the fact
we've been and over a two and a half year
freight recession would sort of suggest there's not a structural
(23:04):
shortage of drivers. No, if somebody says, well, there's a
structural shortage of good drivers, there's a structural shortage of
good everything. So I don't buy that argument whatsoever. But
on the turnover side, certainly turnover rates are quite high
compared to let's say manufacturing, and what that means is
for carriers, even if it's a down market like it's
(23:25):
been for the last two years, I'm still constantly hiring people. Still.
I may not even be trying to grow, I'm just
trying to maintain capacity. I'm still having to hire people
all the time. And so I think folks conflate the
I'm always hiring folks because of turnover with the concept
of a shortage, and they're two completely different things in economics.
Speaker 1 (23:48):
Right, And for those listening, you know, driver Turnover tends
to be high in trucking because it's obviously a pretty
fungible job. If you get pissed off at your dispatcher
at one company, you just might go down the road
and work for a different company. Also, a lot of
people get into trucking. It's usually a second or third
career for them. They think, hey, I'm going to go
see the country, and then they realize it's an extremely
(24:12):
tough profession because you're always on the road, you're you know,
living out of your truck. Obviously, it's an incredibly important
aspect of our economy and without it, most of us
would not have the things that we enjoy every day,
whether it's your I don't know, your beer, your avocados,
or your pillows. I don't know why I chose those
(24:32):
three things. But you know, it is a tough job,
and it's interesting. You know, we have data on the
Bloomberg Terminal from the American Trucking Association, and you know,
one of their data points is turnover at large truckload
providers and that's historically low, and it's historically low at
seventy percent, So we can go above one hundred percent
(24:57):
during really good times so turn over is something that
you know, we kind of look at when we're trying
to figure out what's going on in the trucking market.
Speaker 2 (25:07):
What else is.
Speaker 1 (25:08):
Kind of like a major challenge for the trucking industry?
Do you cover or look at like, you know, these
nuclear verdicts that we've been seeing as of late, Is
that something that you look at.
Speaker 3 (25:22):
I haven't really looked at it that much from a
research standpoint, but it is certainly a topic. I think
in general this even broader issue as well. We keep
seeing cases on broker liability, and especially since a lot
of the big truckload players are also brokerages, that's going
(25:42):
to be a topic that's increasingly important. And the sort
of the vicarious liability aspects of that, what is due
diligence entail? You know, I published a paperback in twenty
twenty where I had argued essentially that we know very
well from the distributions of like the safety scores published
(26:04):
from the Compliance, Safety and Accountability Program by the Federal
Motorcare Safety Administration, I can give you pretty rough guidelines
onto Hey, if a carrier's safety performance is above xyz
threshold on these metrics, you probably don't want to use them,
and so that's something I'll be I'll be curious to
(26:25):
see as the industry continues to become more and more
and more data focused, you know, whether we start to
see you know, carrier selection and whatnot start to incorporate
more of you know, more above the minimum requirements that
FMCSA stipulates that must be used. Is firms try to
(26:48):
essentially avoid these issues. I think the challenges during a
down market it's easier to be very selective. But what
happens when the market turns and then folks are you know,
looking for capacity. You tend to be more willing to
take rest during that time period, right right?
Speaker 1 (27:05):
You have you know, insurance costs and fraud or really
big issues facing the trucking industry. Can we talk about
technology a little bit? You know, what are your views
on AI machine learning? Are you foreigner against it?
Speaker 2 (27:21):
Now? You know what do you think that fits in
with trucking?
Speaker 3 (27:25):
So I think where it fits in very well. And
again this is especially going to be the very large firms.
If you're running a fleet of five trucks, you don't
need this stuff, right, I mean, you probably have a
very sort of stable network you've got a couple anchor shippers.
You can run this operation still on post and notes
with four or five trucks. And that's why a lot
(27:46):
of carriers stay small. They find their niche, they don't
want to get out of it. They don't want to
grow because it's a managerial nightmare, and so for those
firms really don't matter. For the big players, it's going
to just be a general extension of all the analytics
work that we've seen over the years. I mean, you know,
you look at carriers like Schneider has worked a lot with,
(28:06):
you know, Warren Powell when meritus professor from Princeton in
terms of optimization and things like that. It'll just be
even further and further and further improvement in terms of
finding efficiencies in the system. I mean, h Robinson has
been very public about their use of AI to automate
(28:28):
essentially fairly drudgery processes. They get an email asking for
a freight quote, and they can just now have AI
trained to say, hey, here you go, here's what it is.
Because the machine can read it, put the information in
their quoting tool, and it just basically sends an email
back with what the quoting tool tells it, so I
think it'll make further improvements. But I tend to be
(28:51):
a believer in sort of the great innovations thesis, which
is as transportation. If we think about it, the movement
from you know, mules to railroads was a phenomenal exponential
increase in efficiency, and then you could get rail to
(29:11):
truck for certain select movements that was more efficiency, but
the magnitude of that change is far less. I tend
to think for a lot of application specific to trucking.
At the end of the day, unless you get self
driving vehicles, which I think we're very far away from,
AI doesn't change the fundamental what the economists would call
(29:33):
production technology of the truckload sector. It's still about hauling
freight from point A to point B. There's tremendous randomness
in the generation of freight combined with where it's going
to go, and it's all about those economies. The scope
of you know, essentially building connected load chains to go
(29:53):
from A to B, B, two C, C to D
back to A with as minimal downtime as you can
within the concer trains posed by our service regulation. To
the extent, AI makes it better to do that you
may have some more efficiencies, but it's a lot more
incremental potentially than you know, other changes that we may
(30:15):
have had twenty five thirty years ago, where we start
getting combinatorial optimization that can you know, determine how shippers
allocate freight two carriers.
Speaker 1 (30:25):
Yeah, just going back to the comments you made about
h Robinson for those interested in a couple of weeks ago,
we've published a podcast with they've both been the CEO
of Robinson, and he talks a lot about AI and
how they're leveraging technologies. So to self promote, I would
go back and listen to that if I were you.
(30:45):
And so, you know, you mentioned something about autonomous trucking.
It doesn't seem like you're a true believer, at least
not a true believer that it's going to happen tomorrow.
Can you talk about kind of your reservations about, you know,
why you think it's maybe something that's more future teristic
than today.
Speaker 3 (31:03):
So I'd say, first off, drivers do a lot more
than just drive. Their security. They can fix problems when
they happen on the road, So drivers are not just
there to drive, and so you're still going to need
a vehicle with a lot, or you're still going to
need a person accompanying a lot. Drivers take pride in
(31:26):
how they were drive. My dad was a driver for
four years in the eighties, so I come from having
a parent that was in this sector. He primarily hauled
steel coils as a subcontractors, so he was the least
owner operator. Drivers take tremendous pride in their capabilities and
how they drive. No driver actually wants to really babysit
a computer. That is not what they want to do,
(31:49):
and so that is a human element of this that
I don't think is being recognized enough. The other issue
is just in general, only a subset of carrying are
really going to be able to use this technology. It's
going to be your JB Hunter Schneider's where there's a
lot of dedicated capacity for relatively short distance halls. So
(32:09):
I believe JBH is dedicated to vision. The average length
to hall is something like one hundred and fifty to
one hundred and sixty months, so it's it's quite short,
and so it's consistent freight to and from major metro areas.
You're going to need that type of sort of consistency
to justify the higher unit cost of the equipment for
(32:31):
small carriers, which actually today can consider or constitute more
of the industry from a relative standpoint than they did
a decade ago. Small carriers are not going to really
want this technology because their networks don't justify it. But
also you run into the proverbial issue of if my
(32:52):
equipment's down, I now have a higher fixed cost that
I'm having to absorb. It's why a lot of restaurants,
if I'm a all franchisee, the thought of a robot
flipping Hamburgers may sound great until somebody says, well, what
if the robot breaks, right, and then what do you do?
That's I think the type of situation you're looking at
(33:14):
as well, because think about as an autonomous system rolls out,
fixing it when it breaks, and it will break is
going to be much more challenging, and so for a
small firm, you're not going to want to go with that.
And so I certainly think there will be applications, But
if we look at the nature of freight, we're not
(33:35):
I don't see ten years from now the vast majority
of trucks being autonomous that that's just not going to happen.
Speaker 1 (33:41):
Yeah, I totally agree with you, and I think the
most interesting thing about the autonomous technologies is that they
are going to make trucks safer for trucks with drivers
in them, because that technology will really really help things along.
So a little bit little truck humor there for those listening.
(34:04):
You know, I know you do all transports. I know
you do focus on trucking, but you know, I'd love
to hear your thoughts about, you know, the potential for
a Union Pacific Norfolk Southern merger, which is you know,
today UP announced that they are in fact having advanced
talks with Norfolk Southern. So what are your thoughts about
a deal? Do you think a deal can get done
(34:26):
if you do have a thought on that, given that
you know there's a high regulatory hurdle there.
Speaker 3 (34:31):
Yeah, So what I would say is, I'm not going
to speculate on whether the deal will get approved by
you know, let's say the STV YEP. But what I
can say is that combination and I really hadn't appreciated
it till I actually looked at the twenty twenty four
data on rail movements by commodity, and that's when you
realize like this is a monster if this gets created.
(34:55):
So I mean, just to give some statistics, if you
use twenty twenty four US movements, I'm gonna call it UPNS.
I don't know why, I just like the sound of
that better than NSUP. So UPNS would be have forty
three percent of all movements, that's all containers, all car loads,
all truck trailers. BNSF would be a distant second at
(35:18):
that point at twenty seven percent. And for some commodity categories,
for example chemicals, UPNS would have forty nine percent market
share of chemical movements in the US. Now, outside of COLE,
that is your largest carload commodity by a long shot.
CSX is a distant second place at eighteen percent. For
(35:42):
motor vehicles and equipment, UPNS has forty seven percent market
share behind CSX again is a distant second place at
twenty three percent. Even for intermodal containers, so not even
including truck trailers, just intermodal containers, UPNS is forty six
percent market share after BNSF and BNSF is second and
(36:05):
just thirty percent. So you would just have an absolute
monster doing over fifteen million movements a year. And so
I do think one of the challenges is if this
merger were to happen, it puts some pressure on CSX
and BNSF because now, all of a sudden, you have
(36:26):
one integrated monster that each of them is now facing
as their core rival and their respective parts of the country.
Speaker 1 (36:34):
Yeah, and you know, as as his deal progresses, I
would not be surprised if Ben and CSX announced their
own kind of merger because to your point, they'd be
at a competitive disadvantage.
Speaker 2 (36:48):
And the rules that were established by.
Speaker 1 (36:50):
The STB in twenty two thousand and one were really
driven to kind of stop the mergers of large class
one rail So it'll be interesting to see a if
those rules continue, because the STB is having some hearings
in August about, you know, what they can do to
streamline their regulatory process, So it'll be interesting to see
(37:10):
if that includes the kind of rules around M and A.
So you know, you're in academia, which is awesome, What
do you is there a book about transportation that you
know you tell your students like you gotta read this
for and not like a textbook, like just a book
about transportation fiction or nonfiction.
Speaker 3 (37:32):
So certainly for Trucking by far the book I always
make any doctoral student read if they're going to get
into trucking as a book but called Pedal to the
Metal by Lawrence Uhlett. It's from nineteen ninety four. Ulett
is a interestingly enough a sociology professor, but he was
a truck driver for much of the eighties, and so
(37:56):
he tells his stories of working for MOULDI pulled different firms,
and he brings such a unique angle to it as
a sociologist. He talks about why do truck drivers work
so hard? Because every economic theory would say, why would
they work hard? They're working away from direct management oversight,
and we're talking in nineteen eighties. Computers were very, very
(38:20):
very rare at that point in time, and so he
just has such a fascinating perspective on the industry. And
that was what really sort of got me into doing
a lot of the research that I ended up doing,
because it turned out that trucking is one sector where
there's a lot of data available, but it has just
got such unique dynamics that take place that it really
(38:45):
interested me. So that is for me, like the all time,
by far best book on that. I'd say for anybody
who's interested in trucking and is kind of curious about
like electronic logs and things like that. Karen Levy has
a great book called Data Driven that's a good read
(39:07):
in terms of sort of that she went out did
a lot of ethnographic work talking to carriers, talking to
drivers about how electronic log shape things. And so her
work's interesting because myself and some of my colleagues have
so far to date published every paper on the impact
of the electronic logging devices as well as factors that
(39:28):
were affecting carriers adoption of it, And so for me
as a statistician, it's interesting to see sort of that
grant you know, more you know, field interview ethnographic type
of work that really sort of corroborates what we're seeing
when we look at sort of these broader statistical associations
(39:48):
that emerge.
Speaker 1 (39:49):
And you know, we mentioned obviously social media earlier that
you're you know, you're pretty prolific on LinkedIn. Are there
people in transportation that you follow on social media?
Speaker 2 (40:00):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (40:00):
Besides me, of course, so some other folks who I
really like the content they put out. Ken adamo At
dat Sure. Ken puts out some great stuff. And what
I appreciate about Ken is he's willing to, you know, again,
what the data. As much as data can't speak for itself,
you still have to provide the interpretation, but he's willing
(40:22):
to say, here's the data, here's my interpretation. This is
very broad representative. A lot of you may disagree with this,
you know, particularly for example, this idea of the requirement
that brokers have to give truck you know, truckload carriers
information about the pricing and the margin and all of this.
(40:43):
I've been on the record saying it doesn't matter for
a small carrier whether you get this information or not,
because no offense, that gigantic shipper doesn't want to deal
with you directly, You're not going to disintermediate the broker
from this relationship. But so Ken Ken does some great stuff.
Thomas Watson at Freight Waves puts out some really good
(41:07):
analyzes and charts using their sonar program. He focuses a
lot on uh, you know, kind of current state of
the market as well. So it's always nice, you know,
I work a lot using dat's publicly available data, but
it's nice to see you know, corroborating information from different sources.
(41:28):
So I usually really like to give his stuff a
look as well. And then for anybody if you're interested
in like the tariff and trade space, I got to
give a shout out to Richard Baldwin, another fellow academic
across the pond who's phenomenal on that trade space. But
(41:48):
he has a very unique and I think sophisticated way
of really looking at the complexities of the tariffs. You know,
for example, writing an article just the other day about
the Japanese tariffs and really highlighting some of the challenges
in the potentially of fifteen percent tariff on finished Japanese
(42:11):
vehicles may actually mean that when the dust settles, a
fifteen percent tariff finished Japanese vehicle in Japan is actually
now more competitive in the United States than a US
assembled vehicle because of all the swede of tariffs. So
essentially on a relative basis, are we maybe, actually, you know,
(42:33):
with policies like that, inadvertently making ourselves less competitive? And
what are the complexities if Japan If Japanese automakers shift
some sourcing from Mexico back to Japan, for I shouldn't
say sourcing, shift assembly back to Japan, are they actually
(42:53):
better off now exporting from Japan to the US market,
and that hurts US autoparts maker who are actually supplying
to those plants in Mexico but wouldn't supply to the
plants in Japan.
Speaker 1 (43:05):
That sounds a very interesting paper.
Speaker 2 (43:08):
I gotta I gotta take a look at that.
Speaker 3 (43:10):
Oh yeah, yeah, And Richard does a great job and
not again kind of writing for a general audience versus
you know. The one thing for anybody listening to understand
is US academics. If we write complexly, we apologize, but
you should read what we actually write to each other
in the form of peer reviewed papers. They are for
the average person completely unintelligible. We always tell our doctoral
(43:35):
students once they start doing things, it's going to take
you eighteen months till you can actually really read and
understand one of these things. And so, you know, it's
it's interesting to see I think more academics becoming more
involved on social media. I'm another another person, my friend Yao, Jen,
(43:57):
I mean goes by Henry at Miami of Ohio does
a lot of really good, you know, charts out of
Fred just trying to you know, again, trying to put
a better sense and understanding of what's going on.
Speaker 1 (44:08):
And for those interested, we did a podcast with Ken
I think last year from DAT so you might want
to go take a look at.
Speaker 2 (44:16):
A past episode.
Speaker 1 (44:18):
And just I guess before I let you go and
wrap things up here because we're coming towards the the
end of our time. You know, I guess, how did
you first gravitate towards transports, you know, with your with
your studies. How did you say, like, you know, this
is this is what I want to do.
Speaker 3 (44:37):
Yeah, So it was a combination of good timing and whatnot.
So one of my he became one of my dissertation mentors,
John Sildona. He's the Sears endowed share at the University
of West Virginia now, but he had been at Ohio
State at the time, and this would have been twenty eleven,
twenty twelve, and they had just done a massive survey
(44:59):
about organizational control mechanisms in the trucking industry, collecting data
on monitoring technologies can use you know, use of different
incentives turnover, et cetera. And that was right when the
Compliance Safety and Accountability Program had just rolled out and
was publishing all of this data on care safety and
(45:20):
I knew of that, and I'd said, well, John, trucking
is an interesting setting, there's a safety data. Why don't
we merge this together and this will be my dissertation,
and that senate what I ended up doing. And then
once I had went down that rabbit hole, started to
do a lot of research on you know, how did
(45:41):
carrier safety evolve following the CSA program, what factors affected that?
And then I ended up getting really involved more in
the productivity and market side thanks to would have been
a doctoral student at the time of Michigan State, a
gentleman named Bill Muir, who I always tremendous amount of
gratitude too for really opening my eyes to a lot
(46:04):
of the connection between supply chain and economics, and so
kind of one thing led to another. When the ELD
mandate then started to hit, I'd reached out to Kevin Hill,
a carrierless which was eventually bought by Highway, after I
saw him cited in Wall Street Journal about this survey
on trucker the extent carriers were becoming compliant with ELD
(46:28):
mat date and said, hey, I'm an academic, you want
partner on those? And he goes sure, here's the data.
And so we've published some papers off that and then
working with my colleagues and a lot of you know,
really understanding the eld mandate not only the initial effects
but longer term. And you know, it's kind of one
of those you almost diversify as an academic the same
way companies do. You typically start narrow with a line
(46:51):
of business, you get to know that well, you start
to see areas of overlap and other lines of business,
and you sort of diversify yourself out that way.
Speaker 1 (46:59):
Gotcha, all right, great stuff, and Jason, I really appreciate
your time and your insights today. Thanks so much for
joining us on Talking Transports.
Speaker 3 (47:06):
Hey, thanks for having me Lee, and.
Speaker 2 (47:08):
I want to thank you for tuning in.
Speaker 1 (47:09):
If you liked the episode, please subscribe.
Speaker 2 (47:11):
And leave a review.
Speaker 1 (47:13):
We have lined up a number of great guests for
the podcast, so please check back to hear conversations with
C suite executives, shippers, regulators, and decision makers within the
freight markets. Also, if you want to learn more about
the freight transportation markets, check out our work on the
Bloomberg Terminal at BIGO and on social media. This is
(47:33):
Lee Clasgow signing off and thanks for talking transports with me,
Host
Lee Klaskow
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