Trump and the Economy

[Long Run]

Stock market and economy do not move in lock step but do move together over time.

Stock market is high, but not way out of line with historic trends, especially considering how low interest rates are (where else you gonna put your money?): https://www.macrotrends.net/2577/sp-500 ... ings-chart

How much credit is due to administration versus over-riding factors is always a debate, but generally the person sitting in office gets credit for good times.

[rubato]

[" … Hunter Biden has at least the appearance of impropriety. Nothing like the Don Jr and Ivanka level of relying on Daddy's connections of course, and there is no proof that H Biden actually did anything illegal but Joe should have told him to stay well away from his own door step in choice of career.

… "

Whoosh! Now Republicans are using leftist morals to condemn Biden Jr! By their own morals, capitalist morals, if someone offers you an unreasonable amount of money to do something it is good, not bad. And the offer justifies itself.

jackasses.

yrs,
rubato

[rubato]

What we are seeing today is that the "stock market" and" the economy" can do well while the circumstances of the median person suck wind. Go Republican economics! Go and fuck our whole country into a coma!

yrs,
rubato

[Darren]

Do you think Trump even knows — or cares — that truckers are hurting horribly?  Countless truck drivers have reported how they are struggling and trucking companies are going under.  In fact, 2019 has been a “bloodbath” for the trucking industry, with approximately 640 trucking companies going bankrupt in the first half of the year alone.  That’s more than triple the number that went bankrupt in all of 2018.



-"BB"-

Based on my experience, I'm not seeing the issues overall with the trucking industry. On occasion I run a pilot truck for oversized loads. I'm constantly surprised by what's coming out of the locations I get sent to to pick up a load. Most of the locations are old mill buildings that were built long ago in the Pittsburgh area. I see lots of employee's cars parked outside.

The stuff being shipped is over height, over width or over weight. Or a combination. One driver I've run two loads with bought a repoed Peterbilt triaxle semi for $110,000. With financing it came to $190,000. He paid it off in two years, He's running as much as he wants. When I dropped him at a power plant in Kentucky a few days ago he already had two more loads waiting for him. The next was another oversized out of Pittsburgh headed for Texas.

Other oversized drivers report being just as busy. I had problems finding one location which turned out to be a huge pole building in a rural area. The load was two 120' long kelly bars going to California to be used on drilling rigs, The driver had a helluva time getting out of the rural area with something that long. Some of the places loads go are welding and machining businesses apparently for additional work on the fabricated pieces. Those places have lots of employees cars parked outside too. Trying to find a parking space in truck stops is tough. Fortunately the oversized loads have to be off the road earlier by law.

As far as companies going bankrupt. That's not a surprise. Trucking is predatory. Unless you have a business relationship where you're guaranteed freight, it's dog eat dog. It doesn't take much to put you out of business if you make the wrong decisions.

A trucker in the family got a Penske lease semi through the company he runs for. It was in the shop so much it almost put him under. That was after the EPA fucked heavy duty trucks with the new and improved emissions equipment.

The tanker the fire department bought has a Cummins that sometimes goes into regen mode. Diesel fuel is injected into the diesel particulate filter (DPF) and ignited to burn out the soot. The temperature out of the exhaust is 830 °F. Imagine what happens if you park the tanker off road and it goes into regen? Eventually regen doesn't work to unclog the DPF and it must be removed at the dealer and put into a cleaner. Don't drop the DPF though. If you break the matrix a new DPF is $5,000.

Any trucking company that ran Internationals may have gotten the Maxforce engine. The entire line is called Maxfarce by the mechanics that have to work on them. They're dud EPAed engines. Lots of school districts got screwed when they bought buses with the engines. International ended up replacing lots of the engines with new EPAed dud engines that weren't any better. Diesel reliability has become so much of an issue for school districts they've gone back to buying gasoline engines in the buses. Pity the trucking company that got Maxfarced out of business.

Based on my trips I'm seeing as much truck traffic as always. Lots of truckers are pulling the Amazin trailers with the huge dicks painted on the sides. Must be a lot of exuberant consumers buying lots of stuff online to see that many dick trailers on the road.

Based on what I'm seeing from the driver's seat, the economy's great.

[RayThom]

... Based on what I'm seeing from the driver's seat, the economy's great.

That's a lot to say.

[ex-khobar Andy]

Obviously Darren you know a lot more than I do about the trucking industry. But what BB wrote seems to be a common conclusion about road transport.

From International Business Times

Last year was a bad period for the U.S. trucking industry: At least 795 trucking companies failed, about double the number of bankruptcies in the prior year, and shipping capacity was reduced by 24,000 trucks.

Is that plain wrong; or is it just that your end of the haulage business - extra large stuff, if I understand correctly - is immune from these business forces?

And of course self driving trucks are getting ever closer and that will create huge unemployment issues.

[Econoline]

• is it just that your end of the haulage business - extra large stuff, if I understand correctly - is immune from these business forces?

I'll be waiting for an answer from Darren, but I suspect that oversize-hauling services are a niche specialty which may not be affected by trends in the larger freight-hauling industries. One clue is the fact that the driver Darren mentioned who got his used Pete triaxle for $110 grand and paid it off in 2 years bought it after it had been repossessed—presumably from some other not-so-successful owner.

Out around here (especially a little further west, out in Iowa) there are obviously some truckers making a good, reliable income hauling huge wind-turbine blades and tower parts.

[wesw]

self driving trucks, in large numbers is n0t a thing f the near future.

w0uld y0u trust an unmanned truck 0n I-ninety five?

0n the beltway?

n0.

they aren t that g00d. t00 many variables.

what is in the near future is electric trucks.

there has been a recent BIG contract f0r such trucks, by a large and important company.

they aren t stupid, they expect these trucks t0 last at least twenty years

m0st 0f these self driving experiments have quietly failed

t00 much c0rp0rate liability, t00 many accidents and failures.

0ur wh0le infra structure must underg0 massive change bef0re self driving trucks are widely used

can they g0 thru deserted r0ads? sure.

can they navigate thru t0wn safely?

n0.

[Long Run]

This article seems to have a pretty good overview of the trucking situation: https://www.freightwaves.com/news/why-2 ... -operators

Basically, 2017 and 2018 were great years, trucking firms bought more trucks, then volume backed off a bit in 2019 (overall economy cooled a bit as well), leaving too many companies at risk in this highly competitive industry.

[Econoline]

wes — the one situation where I expect self-driving trucks will be employed relatively soon is in long-haul convoys (basically, several unmanned trucks following/drafting a manned lead truck) on interstates and other major divided highways. Especially overnight.

[wesw]

yeah, in the great plains area and desert areas it seems feasible, but we kinda already have railways f0r what y0u suggest.

I mean, the variables are just endless in even semi-rural areas and infinite in traffic.

take 0ne example.

an encounter with a deer ...

we c0uld discuss it f0r a m0nth and I c0uld always add a variable and have a variable f0r every variable until infinity.

it is exponential.

we humans, even the dumb 0nes like me, are pretty special beings.

and as special as we are half 0f us w0uld die if the p0wer grid went d0wn f0r an extended peri0d.

even f0r th0se 0f us Neanderthal wh0 can still gr0w and catch and kill and fix things, the c0mpetiti0n, even in semi-rural areas and rural areas, w0uld be s0 great that it w0uld turn int0 a real struggle, literally.

crap, that t00k a dark turn...., s0rry

[Joe Guy]

Somebody ought to come up with some type of freight moving method where vehicles with big powerful engines can tow large numbers of trailers hooked to each other and moved on on some type of track that doesn't use the highways. They would be able train a lot less people to haul much more freight than a truck can. I'm not sure what they'd call it though.

[ex-khobar Andy]

They already have road trains in Australia.



The thing on the front of the cab is to bounce kangaroos off the road. Probably feral camels, too.

[Bicycle Bill]

Somebody ought to come up with some type of freight moving method where vehicles with big powerful engines can tow large numbers of trailers hooked to each other and moved on on some type of track that doesn't use the highways. They would be able train a lot less people to haul much more freight than a truck can. I'm not sure what they'd call it though.

... which would require a separate network of these custom-designed 'tracks' running hither and yon across the landscape, connecting each and every producer with each and every wholesaler and retailer to distribute these goods.  Either that or a network of these tracks going to a central distribution hub, where goods would be transferred from the original freight-moving vehicles to other, smaller freight-moving vehicles to get the goods to the ultimate endpoint, whether it be the retailer or the consumer himself.

Just saying we DID have something like this and it seemed to work well enough, until enough people started to
1) realize that moving goods in a smaller unit rather than this articulated caravan of trailers reduced costs, eliminated the need for the middle-man 'transfer center', and made it possible for goods to make it from the producer to the retailer more quickly;
2) bitch to high heaven about having to wait, even a couple of minutes, for these caravans of vehicles to make their way across intersections of the custom 'tracks' with other routes of passage and travel;
and, as a corollary to the custom tracks,
3) complain to high heaven about the amount of space consumed by something seen to be a redundant duplication of transport methods.  Who needed these long strings of trailers behind a single vehicle on its own system, the logic went, when individual vehicles, also equipped with powerful (for its size) engines, were already there and able to go literally anyplace without the need for its own proprietary type of roadway?

More is the pity.

-"BB"-

[Darren]

Obviously Darren you know a lot more than I do about the trucking industry. But what BB wrote seems to be a common conclusion about road transport.

From International Business Times

Last year was a bad period for the U.S. trucking industry: At least 795 trucking companies failed, about double the number of bankruptcies in the prior year, and shipping capacity was reduced by 24,000 trucks.

Is that plain wrong; or is it just that your end of the haulage business - extra large stuff, if I understand correctly - is immune from these business forces?

And of course self driving trucks are getting ever closer and that will create huge unemployment issues.

The country is always short drivers. It's not a family friendly business. One I know stays on the road at least a month at a time. He's done that for years. The dispatchers love him

The Hungarian I piloted for recently was a commercial truck driver in Europe before immigrating here. That load was an Alcoa truck wheel test fixture that was relocated from PA to OH. We sat for four hours before the riggers had it loaded. That made him miss a load in Cleveland which would have gotten him to Florida and his home for Christmas.

In general I'm seeing large fabricated items which appear to be custom ordered. Neither the drivers nor I know what they are other than the description on the permits. One was a spilling chassis. One was obviously a large fan made from heavy steel plate possibly for feeding crushed coal at a power plant,

Two of the recent loads went to a coal fired power plant where the equipment will be used in a water treatment facility. Another trip was to Arkansas with two rail cars made in NY to be used for maintaining the railroad's right of way.

On the road I often see Keen trucks. Keen only hauls new large excavating equipment. Typically they pick up the equipment from customs at a port and transport it to an owner.

One trip was two trucks with boxed machining centers that had been imported. Those went from Baltimore to a factory in Erie, PA. Based on my observations, business is good for fabricators.

Two young people I know went to work running CNC machines at two different businesses that make parts out of powdered metal. Those businesses always seem to be hiring lately. With a shortage of 60,000 truck drivers, any driver with a good record doesn't have a problem finding a job. Another friend recently transitioned from prison guard to truck driver. I see his location updates on FB. He's all over the country.

I doubt the self driving trucks take a huge chunk of the business simply because of the variability across the country. GPS isn't accurate in many rural areas. Nor do cellphones work in those areas. I can see them hauling dick boxes for Amazin from manufacturer to distribution center. If they were that good, Walmart would be all over them. Walmart is hiring truck drivers. The other issue is less than trailer load (LTL) shipments where a trucking company specializes in less than full trailer load shipments from one shipper by aggregating stuff from several shippers.

I stopped at a DMV yesterday and was surprised to see an ad for a trucking company on a big screen TV wanting to hire CDL drivers and even train those w/o a CDL. As I said before trucking has always been dog eat dog. The new fucked up hours of service requirements using electronic logs and the fucked up EPAed engines have made it tougher.

I'm not sure if International is finally clear of their Maxxforce engine fiasco. I'm not seeing that school districts were made whole. https://www.ttnews.com/articles/navista ... ce-engines

[BoSoxGal]

I love roadtripping and would love to be a trucker hitting the road just me and my pup - but not if I’m expected to drive 18 hours straight at a stint. It’s too bad the expectations are so inhumane, maybe they’re be fewer accidents and more folks willing to do the work.

[Darren]

Over the road truckers are not allowed to drive 18 hours straight,

The new hours of service (HOS) define what a driver can and cannot do. The downside is when tied to an electronic log just moving the truck triggers time on duty. Nor do the HOS take into account the driver's physical ability. Some need to take rest breaks when others do not. Most drivers are paid by the mile. If the truck isn't under a load and moving they don't make money. By treating drivers as a one sized fits all individual, the HOS can make driving more hazardous.

Unfortunately most times I'm out I've seen some horrendous wrecks. The oversized drivers tend to not pack up like a lot of drivers. Packing up on the road either with cars or trucks is placing a huge amount of trust in the other drivers. Too many are Borging while driving. It only takes a split second for the Borger on their phone to cause a pile up.

I'm especially wary of overtaking doubles and in some states triples. Once those start whipping back and forth it gets dicey fast. I'm astounded by the four wheel drivers that hang next to a truck. That's asking for it if the trucker doesn't know you're there and they have to change lanes fast.

[Econoline]

• American firms aren't beholden to America – but that's news to Trump
  The president’s agreement with China is based on a misunderstanding of the corporate mindset. It’s time to invest in ourselves

  ---

  Robert Reich[/font] | Sat 11 Jan 2020 03.01 EST | Last modified on Sun 12 Jan 2020 05.30 EST

  ---

  Trump’s “phase one” agreement with China, to be signed on Wednesday, is intended partly to slow China’s move into new technologies like electric cars by protecting the intellectual property of American corporations.
  
  Which lends a certain irony to Tesla’s first Model 3 electric sedans now coming off assembly lines at the firm’s new multibillion-dollar plant in Shanghai.
  
  The Model 3 marks a huge milestone for Elon Musk’s company as it rapidly expands in the world’s largest electric-vehicle market. But it’s not a milestone for America.
  
  The people who are learning how to make electric cars ever more efficiently in Tesla’s Shanghai factory are Chinese.
  
  The Chinese are intent on learning as much as they can from Tesla and other leading global corporations. And the corporations don’t care as long as their investments in China pay off.
  
  Trump is demanding China provide stronger patent and copyright protections. But the Chinese who are gaining valuable experience in firms like Tesla will take what they learn and apply it elsewhere regardless.
  
  To the extent that those better protections increase the profits of American firms in China, American firms like Tesla will invest even more in China.
  
  Trump doesn’t understand a basic reality of today’s global economy: the profitability and competitiveness of American corporations aren’t the same as the wellbeing and competitiveness of Americans. American corporations have no particular obligation to the United States. They’re obligated to their shareholders.
  
  About 30% of the shareholders of large American corporations aren’t even American. As global money sloshes ever more quickly across borders, that percentage is growing.
  
  The 500 largest corporations headquartered in the United States are steadily becoming less American. A full 40% of their employees live and work outside the United States. They sell and buy components and services all over world. They do research wherever they find talented engineers and scientists.
  
  China’s share of global research and development already tops America’s. One big reason, according to the National Science Foundation, is that American firms nearly doubled their research and development investments in Asia over the last decade.
  
  They did it because China is a huge and growing market, with an increasing number of talented researchers and well-educated workers.
  
  In 2017, GE announced it was increasing its investments in advanced manufacturing and robotics in China, which it termed “an important and critical market for GE”.
  
  Google has opened an artificial intelligence lab in Beijing, headed by Google’s chief scientist for AI and machine learning.
  
  Even when it comes to technologies linked to national security, American firms have no particular allegiance to America. They’ll make and sell anything, anywhere, unless US law stops them.
  
  Last July, the US Senate held hearings on Facebook’s planned cryptocurrency, called Libra. Facebook executives insisted it be allowed to create the currency or “some other country [that is, China] will”.
  
  But Facebook’s motive for developing Libra has nothing to do with stopping China from creating its own cryptocurrency. Facebook wants to be free to make as much money as it can, wherever. After all, Facebook has spent much of the last decade trying to curry favor with the Chinese in hopes of opening China to Facebook.
  
  Not even the worldwide association Facebook established for Libra is based in the United States. It’s in Switzerland, home of famously lax banking laws.
  
  The reality is that leading global corporations like Tesla, GE, Google and Facebook will create good, high-wage jobs in the United States (or in Britain, Australia, or anywhere else you may be reading this) only if those countries’ inhabitants are clever and productive enough to make it profitable for them to do so.
  
  This means that the real competitiveness of the United States depends on the creativity and productivity of Americans. That in turn depends on Americans’ education (including the basic research that’s done in national labs and universities), health and the infrastructure connecting them to one another.
  
  But the American workforce is hobbled by deteriorating schools, unaffordable college tuitions, decaying infrastructure, soaring healthcare costs and diminishing basic research.
  
  All of which is putting most Americans on a path toward second-rate jobs in the global economy.
  
  Big American-based corporations don’t see it as their responsibility to fix this. They certainly don’t want to pay for it. To the contrary, they’ve lobbied for and received tax cut after tax cut.
  
  Yet they have an iron grip on American politics through their campaign donations, lobbying and public-relations campaigns.
  
  Trump isn’t helping. His economic nationalism continues to champion American corporations, not American workers.
  
  This, not China, is the real source of America’s competitive woes.

[Scooter]

Fifth consecutive month of decline.

Are you winning yet?

[Scooter]

'Approximately 100 percent' of tariff costs have fallen onto Americans, new research shows

President Donald Trump falsely claims that China and other nations have paid the tariffs he levied on thousands of products over the past two years. But "approximately 100 percent" of those costs have fallen onto American buyers, according to a new National Bureau of Economic Research paper.
"Using another year of data including significant escalations in the trade war, we find that US tariffs continue to be almost entirely borne by US firms and consumers," the economists — Mary Amiti of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Stephen J. Redding of Princeton, and David E. Weinstein of Columbia University — wrote in a paper that was circulated this week.

A 10% tariff is associated with about a 10% drop in imports for the first three months, according to the economists, and this relationship becomes more intense as time goes on. So the effects of tariffs, which were increased this fall, may have not yet been fully seen.

The paper, which uses customs data through October 2019, reflects a series of similar independent findings that have been circulated over the past year.

"The continued stability of import prices for goods from China means US firms and consumers have to pay the tariff tax," New York Federal Reserve economists Matthew Higgins, Thomas Klitgaard, and Michael Nattinger wrote in a November study.

The US and China plan to sign this month to sign an interim trade agreement, which was reached in October as the two sides sought to defuse tensions. That stalled several planned escalations, but tariffs were kept on thousands of products shipped between the two largest economies.