On A Road To Recovery? - Several factors pointing toward 2009 being a better year for commercial truck industry

摘要

The 2009 forecast for the commercial truck industry is driven by a number of factors - inflation, interest rates, housing starts and emissions regulations - not necessarily in that order. The first three factors are all macro and intimately bound up with each other. The last one is micro, which may make it seem somehow of less consequence, but in fact, its impact is probably greater than the three macro factors combined. It has been a long time since the U.S. has experienced a sustained inflation. The official number for year-end 2007 based on the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Consumer Price Index was 4.1 %. The last time the U.S. economy registered an annual rate above 4% was 1990, when it registered a rate of 6.3%. In fact, the rate of inflation was 4.5% from 1987 to 1989 and then peaked in 1990, falling after the recession of 1991 - largely as a result of huge productivity increases, which effectively ended a long wage-price spiral. As a result, the Federal Reserve was able to sustainably increase interest rates to a level consistent with healthy economic activity.