With more people waking up to runaway costs on the inflation front such as the skyrocketing cost of lumber adding a stunning $9,000 to build the average home in the United States, this is turning into a crisis…
Extremely Important Note Below
June 21 (King World News) – Here it is a portion of today’s note from legend Art Cashin: They’ll Have No Truck With That – Our good friend and fellow market veteran, Dennis Gartman covers a very, very wide spectrum of things that affect the economy. From commodities to energy costs, Dennis often finds the story on page 35 that will soon be moving to the top of page 1.
This morning, Dennis again touched on the extreme tightness in the trucking industry. Here’s a bit of what he wrote:
ON RISING TRANSPORTATION COSTS: It’s much worse than we thought: there are simply no truckers… and trucks… out there to move the “stuff” America needs. We read recently of a trucking company in Minnesota that has raised its wages for its drivers by 15% to $80,000/year and still the owner cannot find the drivers she needs. Joyce Brenny, the CEO of Brenny Transportation, said in an interview with The Washington Post that last year she could get goods moved to client businesses within a day or two at worst; now it is a week or two instead. As Ms. Brenny said:
“I’ve never seen it like this… ever. It doesn’t
matter what the load even pays, there are just no drivers.”
The problem is that the talk of driverless trucks in the future is scaring off Millennials from taking up the job of driving trucks now and we can understand that reticence on their part. Why “study” and train for a job that everyone tells you shall be made wholly redundant n a less than a decade. But there is more here than mere future redundancy for as we’ve written about previously the Federal government…once again in its all-seeing “wisdom”… imposed a new rule mandating that drivers shall be in the road only 11 hours at a time before resting for several hours, with each driver required to have an electronic timing device to ensure that the requirements are adhered to. From what we understand, the timing devices are tamper proof.
The situation shall only become worse in the weeks, months and years ahead, for as Ms. Brenny noted, she fears that other trucking companies are now stealing her drivers with wages even higher than are hers and that she will have to raise her payments to her drivers by another 10% this year simply to avoid that problem. As Mr. Robert Costello, the Chief Economist of the American Trucking Association, said in an interview with The Washington Post recently,
IT is as bad as it has ever been. Companies are doing everything they can to make drivers happy; increasing pay and getting them home more often, but that means they are not driving as many miles.
Speaking to the media, Mr. Costello said that last year there was a shortage in the country of approximately 51,000 truck drivers compared to 36,000 in ‘16. That number will rise this year and the next and the next apparently, driving costs up and weighing upon inflation statistics in the process. We are told that the cost of shipping a “dry good” by truck has risen by 40% in the past year, and we should note what our good friend, Peter Boockvar, said regarding shipping:
Every single good ends up on a truck at some point…[and] businesses that use trucking to receive and ship goods are going to do their best to pass on the costs to the rest of us.
That, dear friends, is a given.
On a different subject but in a somewhat similar vein, frackers in the Permian Basin are closing functioning wells because a lack of pipelines (and/or truckers) offer them little to no way to get the oil to market.
King World News note: This will exacerbate the problem of ramping inflation that is making it very difficult for the average person in the U.S. to survive. This is beginning to look like the 1970s all over again, only on steroids. We all know how that ended.
The KWN audio interview with Dr. Stephen Leeb discussing China’s 20,000 tonnes of gold and their plans for a gold monetary order has now been released and you can listen to it by CLICKING HERE OR ON THE IMAGE BELOW.
***ALSO JUST RELEASED: The War In The US Dollar, Crude Oil Markets And How It Will Impact Gold & Silver CLICK HERE.
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