Continued geopolitical instability is making it hard to manage expectations for both shipping and transportation markets for the rest of the year. Follow the Freightonomics Podcast Other FreightWaves Shows Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rough Waters

Freightonomics

Welcome back to the Freightonomics portion of FreightWaves today. Zach Strickland, Director of Freight Market Intelligence. I'm joined by DJ Donahue, our new economist here at FreightWaves slash Sonar, however you use us.

So, on today's show, we're really going to talk about, we're going to do some deep dives into the ocean. Trade policy, geopolitical struggles and uncertainty have really continued, I think, further than a lot of people expected it to.

We're seeing spot rates for ocean increase. We're seeing port volumes remain fairly steady in port volumes. The truckload market starting to take a little bit of a step back, but as you'll learn, for those of you that are viewing into this hour or this show independently, that there is a little bit of an explanation for that, and it's no reason for concern on a lot of people who operate in the space thinking, oh, maybe the freight cycle is ending early. No, that's not the case.

But we've got some data that supports that as usual. DJ, we also had a lot of economic news this week that we were going to dive into. The inflation figures, you know, this is where I sort of want to start the show today, is with the economic news. We had CPI, PPI readings. These are headline figures, and for those of you that don't know why inflation is such an important figure for anybody in transportation,

is because it influences goods demand. As inflation gets higher, affordability can sometimes be impacted by that. Not always. This particular inflation remains sticky. A lot of it is explainable by some of the geopolitical stuff, as well as some of the trade policy stuff that has been going on for the last year and a half.

Rough Waters

Read the full transcript

The candid version is on a podcast,
not the earnings call.

Rough Waters

Read the full transcript

The candid version is on a podcast, not the earnings call.

The candid version is on a podcast,
not the earnings call.