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EndGame Macro
Truck Sales Are Quietly Warning the Market
Truck sales are weak because fleets don’t trust demand or credit conditions, but labor supply is quietly tightening at the same time. The recent rule changes around non domiciled CDLs matter here. By narrowing eligibility and pushing enforcement even amid legal uncertainty, thousands of drivers and potentially far more over time are being forced out of the industry. That doesn’t show up immediately as higher sales or higher wages. It shows up as hesitation. Carriers delay decisions because the operating environment just got less predictable.
Cyclical Weakness Meets Policy Driven Friction
On the cyclical side, freight demand cooled after the post COVID boom, rates fell, and credit tightened. That alone explains a lot of the collapse in truck orders. But policy is now adding friction at exactly the wrong moment. Pulling drivers out of the labor pool doesn’t revive freight demand; it raises uncertainty around capacity, compliance, and costs. Fleets are left asking whether they’ll have the drivers they need 6 months from now, what wages will look like, and whether financing even makes sense if utilization stays low. When business confidence is already fragile, that kind of uncertainty freezes capital spending.
Where This Puts Us In The Chain
Freight usually weakens first, then credit, then labor. We’re in the uncomfortable middle. Demand is soft, credit is restrictive, and labor policy is adding stress instead of relief. The result isn’t a clean recession signal yet, services are still carrying the broader economy but it is a setup for delayed pain. If demand doesn’t recover, carriers won’t order trucks. If carriers don’t order, manufacturers cut back. If labor availability tightens while volumes stay weak, margins get squeezed and layoffs follow. That’s how a slow grind turns into a sharper downturn.
My View
This isn’t just about trucks. It’s about confidence. The freight economy runs on long dated decisions in financing, hiring, equipment and routes. When demand weakens and policy introduces uncertainty around labor at the same time, businesses choose caution. That’s why this signal matters. Not because it guarantees a recession tomorrow, but because it shows an economy where growth is losing its footing and policy choices are amplifying stress instead of cushioning it.
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Truck Sales Are Quietly Warning the Market
Truck sales are weak because fleets don’t trust demand or credit conditions, but labor supply is quietly tightening at the same time. The recent rule changes around non domiciled CDLs matter here. By narrowing eligibility and pushing enforcement even amid legal uncertainty, thousands of drivers and potentially far more over time are being forced out of the industry. That doesn’t show up immediately as higher sales or higher wages. It shows up as hesitation. Carriers delay decisions because the operating environment just got less predictable.
Cyclical Weakness Meets Policy Driven Friction
On the cyclical side, freight demand cooled after the post COVID boom, rates fell, and credit tightened. That alone explains a lot of the collapse in truck orders. But policy is now adding friction at exactly the wrong moment. Pulling drivers out of the labor pool doesn’t revive freight demand; it raises uncertainty around capacity, compliance, and costs. Fleets are left asking whether they’ll have the drivers they need 6 months from now, what wages will look like, and whether financing even makes sense if utilization stays low. When business confidence is already fragile, that kind of uncertainty freezes capital spending.
Where This Puts Us In The Chain
Freight usually weakens first, then credit, then labor. We’re in the uncomfortable middle. Demand is soft, credit is restrictive, and labor policy is adding stress instead of relief. The result isn’t a clean recession signal yet, services are still carrying the broader economy but it is a setup for delayed pain. If demand doesn’t recover, carriers won’t order trucks. If carriers don’t order, manufacturers cut back. If labor availability tightens while volumes stay weak, margins get squeezed and layoffs follow. That’s how a slow grind turns into a sharper downturn.
My View
This isn’t just about trucks. It’s about confidence. The freight economy runs on long dated decisions in financing, hiring, equipment and routes. When demand weakens and policy introduces uncertainty around labor at the same time, businesses choose caution. That’s why this signal matters. Not because it guarantees a recession tomorrow, but because it shows an economy where growth is losing its footing and policy choices are amplifying stress instead of cushioning it.
⚠️Plummeting US heavy truck sales point to a spike in the unemployment rate:
Heavy truck sales dropped -119,000 from June to November, to a 336,000 annual rate, the lowest since the 2020 Crisis.
Historically, such a rapid decline has rarely occurred outside of a recession.
It has also served as a leading indicator for US unemployment.
This now signals at least a +1.0 percentage point increase in the unemployment rate, to ~5.5%, over the next 6–9 months.
Is the US economy in a recession? tweet
AkhenOsiris
RT @buccocapital: Absolutely fascinating and wonderful response from @benedictevans about where work will be done: ChatGPT/Gemini/etc or SaaS
From @BenBajarin’s pod. Long but VERY worth it!
“Well, there's maybe two answers to this. One of them is, you know, think of a use case like, you know, take a photograph of a recipe and then take a photograph of your fridge and say, hey, use Instacart to order whatever I don't have. Now, these systems can kind of do that now.
They might get something wrong. You might have to check, but they'll basically be able to do that. Is that something that you should do in ChatGPT or in Instacart?
Where should you, what should the entry path to that be? How should that work? Anyhow, again, it kind of comes back to this phrase, the thin wrapper.
So, that's its scenario. Instacart would be like a thin wrapper. Of course, the real thin wrappers are all the apps that the model apps put out.
ChatGPT is a thin wrapper. It's an input box and an output box and nothing else. But I remember, as both of you know, Stephen Sanofsky, I worked with at A16Z, and he was sort of pointing out that in the mid to late 90s, people were saying this about Windows, that the operating system is...
Because before we're operating “before GUIs, like word processor, I had to do printing and graphics and file storage and everything else. And now with Windows, the operating system was doing all of that. So what was left for the application?
Well, it was just like a thin wrapper on some Win32 APIs. Basically, all the hard stuff was being done by the operating system, and Microsoft Office is just like a thin Win32 wrapper. And which is kind of technically true if you're Bill Gates, but kind of not true if you're a user.
And so you've got this kind of question of like, how generalized and how specific do the use cases become? How much is it that you ask this thing to do anything for you? And I think there's a kind of fascinating kind of challenge in here, because, actually going back to Bill Gates, he was talking about this like two, three years ago.
He was saying this is the biggest thing since the GUI. Because with the GUI, you didn't need to memorize keyboard commands, so you have this massive expansion in what software can be. But someone still needs to have made that piece of software.
So “if you want to do your taxes on a computer, someone needs to have made a piece of tax software. Whereas in principle, I could just ask ChatGPT, hey, just go do my taxes for me. And so you could have this huge expansion in how much stuff could be done in a software without needing individual pieces of software.
The problem is, most of those use cases, the user doesn't think like that. So you kind of do need that piece of software still.
I mean, I had a conversation with the CIO at a big retailer a couple of weeks ago, and it kind of occurred to me that like, there's all this question like, should I do this in Oracle, or should I export it into a CSV and do it in Excel? Or should I do it in a SaaS app?
To solve this problem generically, is it best done using the general purpose tools in Oracle, SAP or Salesforce or something? Or in a vertical SaaS app that unbundles like graduate recruit hiring or something, or accounts payable reconciliation into some specific SaaS application, which is why every big company has four or five hundred SaaS apps. They're all unbundling SAP or Oracle.
Or the third case is, do I export a CSV and do it in Excel? And maybe now what ChatGPT does is it's like it's a false option on that scale. It will enable massively more SaaS apps because now there will be this whole class of stuff you can make a piece of software to do that you couldn't do before.
But there will also be this question of like, should I do that in Excel? Should I do that in ChatGPT? Should I [...]
RT @buccocapital: Absolutely fascinating and wonderful response from @benedictevans about where work will be done: ChatGPT/Gemini/etc or SaaS
From @BenBajarin’s pod. Long but VERY worth it!
“Well, there's maybe two answers to this. One of them is, you know, think of a use case like, you know, take a photograph of a recipe and then take a photograph of your fridge and say, hey, use Instacart to order whatever I don't have. Now, these systems can kind of do that now.
They might get something wrong. You might have to check, but they'll basically be able to do that. Is that something that you should do in ChatGPT or in Instacart?
Where should you, what should the entry path to that be? How should that work? Anyhow, again, it kind of comes back to this phrase, the thin wrapper.
So, that's its scenario. Instacart would be like a thin wrapper. Of course, the real thin wrappers are all the apps that the model apps put out.
ChatGPT is a thin wrapper. It's an input box and an output box and nothing else. But I remember, as both of you know, Stephen Sanofsky, I worked with at A16Z, and he was sort of pointing out that in the mid to late 90s, people were saying this about Windows, that the operating system is...
Because before we're operating “before GUIs, like word processor, I had to do printing and graphics and file storage and everything else. And now with Windows, the operating system was doing all of that. So what was left for the application?
Well, it was just like a thin wrapper on some Win32 APIs. Basically, all the hard stuff was being done by the operating system, and Microsoft Office is just like a thin Win32 wrapper. And which is kind of technically true if you're Bill Gates, but kind of not true if you're a user.
And so you've got this kind of question of like, how generalized and how specific do the use cases become? How much is it that you ask this thing to do anything for you? And I think there's a kind of fascinating kind of challenge in here, because, actually going back to Bill Gates, he was talking about this like two, three years ago.
He was saying this is the biggest thing since the GUI. Because with the GUI, you didn't need to memorize keyboard commands, so you have this massive expansion in what software can be. But someone still needs to have made that piece of software.
So “if you want to do your taxes on a computer, someone needs to have made a piece of tax software. Whereas in principle, I could just ask ChatGPT, hey, just go do my taxes for me. And so you could have this huge expansion in how much stuff could be done in a software without needing individual pieces of software.
The problem is, most of those use cases, the user doesn't think like that. So you kind of do need that piece of software still.
I mean, I had a conversation with the CIO at a big retailer a couple of weeks ago, and it kind of occurred to me that like, there's all this question like, should I do this in Oracle, or should I export it into a CSV and do it in Excel? Or should I do it in a SaaS app?
To solve this problem generically, is it best done using the general purpose tools in Oracle, SAP or Salesforce or something? Or in a vertical SaaS app that unbundles like graduate recruit hiring or something, or accounts payable reconciliation into some specific SaaS application, which is why every big company has four or five hundred SaaS apps. They're all unbundling SAP or Oracle.
Or the third case is, do I export a CSV and do it in Excel? And maybe now what ChatGPT does is it's like it's a false option on that scale. It will enable massively more SaaS apps because now there will be this whole class of stuff you can make a piece of software to do that you couldn't do before.
But there will also be this question of like, should I do that in Excel? Should I do that in ChatGPT? Should I [...]
Offshore
AkhenOsiris RT @buccocapital: Absolutely fascinating and wonderful response from @benedictevans about where work will be done: ChatGPT/Gemini/etc or SaaS From @BenBajarin’s pod. Long but VERY worth it! “Well, there's maybe two answers to this. One of them…
do it in the dedicated vertical app?
Should I do it in the horizontal app? And I don't think the answer is you'll just do all of it in the dedicated, in ChatGPT. And I almost feel like it's like, I feel like it's weird to even have to say that.
And then there's the two hour podcast where we talk about how we'll have human-level PhD researchers next year. Yes. So there's a very weird split.
I mean, I've said this a bunch. It's like, the last OpenAI, one of the last OpenAI videos, they spend the first 20 minutes “saying we're going to have human-level AI researchers.” And then they say,” oh, also, we're going to have thousands of ISVs.”
Like, well, which is it? Either you can have the software as a person, or you're going to have loads of independent vertical pieces of software, but not both.
I think within OpenAI, that's the tensions really coming back to front-facing product plus APIs, right? Because I use a bunch of SaaS software that integrates ChatGPT as something that will just work with the data sets or help you build a model.
And it's just using, right? It's just a wrapper. It's just calling APIs for their tokens.
But then I also use GPT as a front-end for a handful of things, right? And so that's the continued tension. Gemini, Google will be in the same thing.
There's APIs. You can use it on your back-end SaaS, or you can use it as a front-end for X, Y, and Z, I guess, right? There's the two sides of their model.”
tweet
Should I do it in the horizontal app? And I don't think the answer is you'll just do all of it in the dedicated, in ChatGPT. And I almost feel like it's like, I feel like it's weird to even have to say that.
And then there's the two hour podcast where we talk about how we'll have human-level PhD researchers next year. Yes. So there's a very weird split.
I mean, I've said this a bunch. It's like, the last OpenAI, one of the last OpenAI videos, they spend the first 20 minutes “saying we're going to have human-level AI researchers.” And then they say,” oh, also, we're going to have thousands of ISVs.”
Like, well, which is it? Either you can have the software as a person, or you're going to have loads of independent vertical pieces of software, but not both.
I think within OpenAI, that's the tensions really coming back to front-facing product plus APIs, right? Because I use a bunch of SaaS software that integrates ChatGPT as something that will just work with the data sets or help you build a model.
And it's just using, right? It's just a wrapper. It's just calling APIs for their tokens.
But then I also use GPT as a front-end for a handful of things, right? And so that's the continued tension. Gemini, Google will be in the same thing.
There's APIs. You can use it on your back-end SaaS, or you can use it as a front-end for X, Y, and Z, I guess, right? There's the two sides of their model.”
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AkhenOsiris
RT @stockthoughts81: Sharing this for my extended family. A 15-year-old has been battling Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML) since August and the road ahead is heavy. If you’re able to donate or even just RT, thank you. https://t.co/QPjXitKp0q https://t.co/Ylvediys3q
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RT @stockthoughts81: Sharing this for my extended family. A 15-year-old has been battling Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML) since August and the road ahead is heavy. If you’re able to donate or even just RT, thank you. https://t.co/QPjXitKp0q https://t.co/Ylvediys3q
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memenodes
LeBron’s opening line being…”First of all, happy…happy International Women’s Day” cracks me up EVERY time https://t.co/MjjungCCbt
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LeBron’s opening line being…”First of all, happy…happy International Women’s Day” cracks me up EVERY time https://t.co/MjjungCCbt
What’s the best LeBron Moment tweet
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Quiver Quantitative
BREAKING: Trump has vetoed a bill proposed by Representative Lauren Boebert that was passed unanimously by Congress.
Boebert just said:
"I sincerely hope this veto has nothing to do with political retaliation for calling out corruption" https://t.co/LoGKcKmRyw
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BREAKING: Trump has vetoed a bill proposed by Representative Lauren Boebert that was passed unanimously by Congress.
Boebert just said:
"I sincerely hope this veto has nothing to do with political retaliation for calling out corruption" https://t.co/LoGKcKmRyw
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memenodes
crazy high school reunion btw
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crazy high school reunion btw
The final episode of Stranger Things 😭 https://t.co/6fRwg2RZGn tweet
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memenodes
when i accidentally refresh my tl and lose the post i was intrested in https://t.co/0hCDlRF05Z
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when i accidentally refresh my tl and lose the post i was intrested in https://t.co/0hCDlRF05Z
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