Editorial: The Recession That Already Was

Word last week that top economic gurus have marked the start of the U.S. recession back to last March caught some by surprise.

It shouldn’t have.

Among trucking firms and their manufacturing customer base, plus among importers and retailers who depend on trucking services to move freight from docks to stores, the notion that business has been going downhill was hardly a news flash.

Now it’s official. For most of this year, and long before any government officials or most private forecasters would dare say so, overall commercial activity has not only been slowing down but has actually been contracting.

Trucking saw it coming a long time ago, warned about it over and over and tried to get the attention of policymakers last year and earlier this year to head off the worst of it.

Some government officials and economists, however, were blind to how bad things had become. Some took refuge in the mistaken rule of thumb that it takes two straight negative quarters reported by the Commerce Department to produce an actual recession. Those data had not materialized yet.

Still, the trucking community is made up of people who have to take a clear-eyed view of business conditions. Calling it a severe slowdown or an actual recession makes little real difference. Trucking wasn’t fooled.

Certainly, the hard jolts following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks made it all too plain that the United States was no longer seeing commercial activity expand. Yet even before that tragic day, it took a lot of denial to believe that the economy was still growing, or that recovery was just around the corner.

Nowhere was the evidence of recession more obvious than in trucking. Truckers who had parked their rigs by the thousands last autumn and winter amid skyrocketing fuel prices found that when those prices ebbed there simply was not enough freight to move.

Now that we are officially in the midst of a recession, it’s the job of the federal policymakers to get us out. We need to be sure that interest rates remain low and money supply remains high, through the actions of the Federal Reserve Board.

Those actions should encourage consumers to spend their money, which in turn should spur manufacturers and retailers to spend theirs. And then we can start a new growth period, one that may even exceed the 10 straight years that just ended with this recession.

This story appeared in the Dec. 3 print edition of Transport Topics. Subscribe today.

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