5/5/08

Well, another light day, so I guess that's about enough of that. I'm set up pretty decent for tomorrow though, so things should be looking up. I headed down the street and delivered to a bonded warehouse bright and early this morning. The freight comes out of Mexico, drives to Georgia, gets taken off my trailer and put into a drayage container, heads over to the port, and leaves the country. For my part, it was a pretty easy deal. The dock area was a little tight and on the blindside, but no big deal.

Before they got me unloaded, I received my next planned load info. I had to head down the road a few miles and pick up a load headed to the north side of Statesville, North Carolina. Nine deadhead miles and three hundred loaded miles, so yeah, another light day. That was a nice and smooth run, followed by an easy drop/hook on the back end. I drove back down to the west side of Statesville to park and grab a bite to eat.

After an hour or so of down time, I got beeped a few minutes ago with the details for my next load. I'll be picking up in Sanford, North Carolina tomorrow morning and heading up to New York. That's 140 miles on the deadhead and another 700-something loaded. By the time I got the assignment, it was getting to be that time of day where parking starts to dry up. I don't know of any reliable spots between here and Sanford, so I'll just stay here tonight and head over early in the morning. The load is a drop/hook, so I should be able to run a long shift tomorrow and dump it on Wednesday.

Ready for a "gut instinct" predicition? (It's about economics and not sports, so I'm probably right.) No recession. Just a little slowdown, accentuated by a bunch of overblown hype, and further accentuated by our own Chicken Little tendencies.

I could bore you with a bunch of theory about the foreseeable halt to interest rate cuts, signifying a strengthening dollar in the coming months, coupled with slightly supressed demand for oil, coupled with a cautious and prudent return of significant capital to the traditional non-commodity markets, generating increased liquidity and reduced overbidding on the oil market, coupled with a very minor alleviation of inflation at the personal level on account of those much-maligned rebate checks, and assisted by pessimistic forward-looking equity valuations, but that wouldn't be a "gut instinct." Instead I'll say that the local and LTL outfits have started ringing my phone again.

They must see some growth on the horizon, and I'll trust a businessman over a politician any day of the week. If they're looking toward growth, and we haven't yet seen a contraction (first quarter GDP grew slightly), I don't see much chance that there will be six months of negative growth in the near future. So there. No recession.