Trucker Tom

For the past couple of weeks, my part of the trucking business as a company driver has been extremely slow. I don’t ever remember it becoming and staying this slow. I had a measly one 650-mile trip last week, and I was sitting the rest of the time waiting for another load.

If a recession turns into a depression, wouldn’t the trucking business be the first to encounter it?

I think we may have just crossed into economic depression territory.

The things that scare me about what’s going on is that (1) Obama keeps “talking down” the economy in order to get his way. He’s got so much attention focused on him it scares the hell out of a lot of people when the president says things are bad and they are getting worse. (2) People owe massive amounts of personal debt with many of them living on the edge of insolvency. I think the “normal” economy has been running on a lot of credit for some time, sub-prime fake money that didn’t really exist. Credit cards, sub-prime car and home loans didn’t exist in the Great Depression. (3) People are getting laid off in massive numbers, giving people the tiny push they need to make them go over the economic cliff.

Food shipments usually don’t drop much in a recession. I think people aren’t buying as much because they just don’t have the money.