Class 8 heavy-duty truck orders collapsed in April by the most on record plunging 73% but there is no sign of a V-shaped recovery Class 8 orders once again plunged 62.5% in May, Sales came in at just over 9,000 trucks.
Don Ake, vice president of commercial vehicles at FTR, tried to look at the bright side: “It’s not a horrible number. It’s a fair number under bad conditions. It is going to be a long, slow climb back.” Honestly, it sounds like he is blowing smoke and it’s much worse than He is acknowledging. Class 8 truck orders are highly cyclical so it’s not a direct insight but it still offers us something in relation to the underlying demand for goods shipped in the US. Another troubling sign is truckers no longer seem willing to deliver to cities while things remain hectic. The next issue we covered is the statements from Jerome Powel that the Feds interventions have not caused wealth inequality and they pointed to the fact that wealth inequality has been growing for 4 decades. Now it’s not only unjust to blame the free market on the rise of wealth inequality rather than accepting the blame so we can begin to fix it. Funny thing is a major event took place 40 years ago as this is when the US closed the gold window and we officially departed from the Gold standard. Since then the runaway money printing has been the exact catalyst to propel the growing wealth divide, in fact, the departure from sound money is when compensation began to drop for the lower wage earners and the decline in wages in general. So it was actually the Fed who began this downward spiral and not taking accountability for the destruction of the middle class as a result of the Feds money printing.