UK Fuel Price Intelligence – Market analytics from reporting stations
Live UK fuel price averages, motorway premium, supermarket discount and brand comparisons from the Fuel Finder scheme.
This Week
Borderlands Mexico: Nearshoring fuels 800K-square-foot industrial build in El Paso
Borderlands Mexico is a weekly rundown of developments in the world of United States-Mexico cross-border trucking and trade. This week in Borderlands Mexico: Nearshoring fuels 800K-square-foot industrial build in El Paso; Hutchison Ports adds electric cranes at Port of Manzanillo; and Burlington breaks ground on distribution center near Phoenix. Nearshoring fuels 800K-square-foot industrial build in El Paso A Dallas-based developer has broken ground on a major cross-border industrial project in ...
Less-than-truckload rates have sharp response to broader market turn
Chart of the Week: LTL Monthly Cost per Hundredweight, Van Contract Rate Per Mile Initial Report – USA SONAR: LTL.USA, VCRPM1.USA After a fairly sluggish start to the year, less-than-truckload (LTL) rates are now showing the highest levels of upward pressure since the exit of Yellow in the summer of 2023. The LTL monthly cost per hundredweight index measures pricing change momentum in the LTL market. This index tracks directional changes in the LTL pricing environment based on transactional data...
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Port Houston lands $48M federal grant for Bayport expansion
Port Houston has secured a $48 million federal grant to expand and modernize its Bayport Container Terminal, a move aimed at boosting capacity, easing truck congestion and strengthening supply chain resilience along the Gulf Coast. The funding, awarded through the U.S. Maritime Administration’s Port Infrastructure Development Program, will support construction of a new container yard and a new exit gate at Bayport. Port Houston will also contribute roughly $56 million in matching funds for the p...
Traffix expects double-digit rate increases to hold through 2026
The North American freight market has officially turned the corner. After more than three years of subdued rates following the COVID-era boom, carriers have exited the market in droves, regulatory headwinds have further crimped capacity, and freight volumes are once again climbing. The result, according to Traffix’s newly released Q2 2026 Market Update, is a rapidly tightening environment where spot and contract rates are surging and shippers are being forced to rethink budgets that were built f...
Do Market Reforms Cause Growth?
Do market-oriented reforms cause economic growth? This paper revisits this question using a cross-country panel of reform episodes identified from various changes in well-known economic freedom and structural reform indices. We exploit the timing of reforms using distributed-lag and event-study frameworks that trace the dynamic response of per-capita GDP. We find little evidence of immediate growth gains and some short-run adjustment costs following reform. However, growth rises gradually and pe...
SONAR Sitrep: US industrials, freight unexpected winners in Iran war
Contrary to consensus expectations, the ongoing conflict in Iran isn’t just a geopolitical risk – it is actively widening the U.S. industrial cost advantage. While global competitors in Europe and Asia are grappling with surging gas prices and heavy war-risk premiums, the United States is emerging as a structural winner in heavy manufacturing. The catalyst? The unique mechanics of “associated gas” – natural gas produced as a byproduct of oil drilling. As elevated global crude oil (WTI) prices in...
Make it make sense: Low demand, rising rates on the trans-Pacific
The stalemate in the Iran war has been anything but for ocean container spot rates on the trans-Pacific. While there has been little diplomatic progress between Washington and Tehran toward ending the conflict, the ongoing blockade of the Strait of Hormuz by United States forces has been fueling (pun intended) higher ocean prices during a traditional lull prior to the start of the peak shipping season. Asia-U.S. West Coast spot rates increased 1% to $2,675 per forty foot equivalent unit (FEU), a...
Prediction Market Structured Notes
Also BDC redemptions, private credit bid/ask, GLP-1 marketing and Jamie Dimon Media.
Are Algae Securities Fraud?
Carbon onsets, mini-millionaire hedge funds and float-adjusted indexes.
does revenue seasonality translate to vol seasonality?
Friends,Last month H&R Block (NYSE: HRB) sold off hard on AI fears. Implied volatility soared to a new 1-year high. I wouldn’t have noticed if I wasn’t prepping materials for the kids’ Investment Beginnings Class. In the class, we learn how growth expectations as embodied by P/E multiples combined with what earnings materialize to generate a return that is some mix of reality and how those expectations are revised as investors “see the flop”. HRB is a low P/E, high earnings yield company whose g...
Why the Northeast is quietly running out of diesel
The East Coast of the U.S. is reporting its lowest seasonal diesel inventory on record. And some trucking companies appear spooked. The East Coast typically stores around 62 million barrels of diesel during the month of May, according to Department of Energy data. But as of last Friday, that region of the U.S. is reporting under 52 million barrels. The sharp increase of diesel prices has been a major stressor in America’s $800 billion trucking industry since the beginning of 2022. According to D...
No, America is not in a "stealth manufacturing boom"
Photo by John Morgan via Wikimedia CommonsGreg Ip of the WSJ is one of my favorite economics writers, and you should always read what he writes. But in a recent post about manufacturing, I think he gets the main narrative wrong. Greg writes that America is in the middle of a “manufacturing revival”, which his headline writer calls a “stealth manufacturing boom”:You won’t hear this from either critics or fans of President Trump’s tariffs, but there’s a manufacturing revival going on…Critics have ...
What if a few AI companies end up with all the money and power?
Last year, a lot of people (including me) were wondering if the AI industry was in a bubble. These days it’s looking a lot less likely. The technology has found its killer app — agentic coding, which has upended the software industry as we know it. For power users, AI is no longer just a chatbot — you can tell it to go make you an app, or run some data analysis, and it’ll just do it for you and come back with the results. This is making a LOT of money. As I predicted, Anthropic has been quicker ...
Bond risk premiums -- certainty found and lost again
This is a second post from a set of comments I gave at the NBER Asset Pricing conference in early November at Stanford. Conference agenda here. My full slides here. First post here, on new-Keynesian modelsI commented on "Downward Nominal Rigidities and Bond Premia" by François Gourio and Phuong Ngo. The paper was about bond premiums. Commenting made me realize that I thought I understood the issue, and now I realize I don't at all. Understanding term premiums still seems a fruitful area of resea...
Time for a new (?) theory of regulation
What's the basic story of economic regulation? Econ 101 courses repeat the benevolent dictator theory of regulation: There is a "market failure," natural monopoly, externality, or asymmetric information. Benevolent regulators craft optimal restrictions to restore market order. In political life "consumer protection" is often cited, though it doesn't fit that economic structure. Then "Chicago school" scholars such as George Stigler looked at how regulations actually operated. They found "regulato...
New-Keynesian models, a puzzle of scientific sociology
This post is from a set of comments I gave at the NBER Asset Pricing conference in early November at Stanford. Conference agenda here. My full slides here. There was video, but sadly I took too long to write this post and the NBER took down the conference video. I was asked to comment on "Downward Nominal Rigidities and Bond Premia" by François Gourio and Phuong Ngo. It's a very nice clean paper, so all I could think to do as discussant is praise it, then move on to bigger issues. These are real...
The Robots Make the Predictions
Polymarket bots, OBDC II tenders, Rivian CEO pay, Claude capital allocation, World Liberty and Boardy.
Traders Do Something About the Weather
Also hedge-fund reneging, Polymarket vs. Kalshi and Onion Futures Act protests.
AIbirds
NewBird AI, an Avis Budget squeeze, sports factor models and recursive online courses.
Prediction Market Making Is Hard
Liquidity provision, event resolution, the Mythos trade, fintech concierges and AI Zuck.
Robot Retail Investors
Automatic dip-buying, a Satoshi candidate, dispersion and counting widgets.
The Factorio Mindset
The Factorio MindsetI used to be of the opinion that the computer game Factorio was a colossal waste of talent, burning many billions of dollars of GDP every year. It seemed downright pathological that Shopify lets employees expense it. If anything, my view was that Amazon should be reimbursing Shopify employees for playing.But since trying it out a bit more I’m starting to suspect that Factorio is the rare computer game to actually increase GDP. In Factorio, players gather resources and craft i...
Stripe and Solid-State Economics
Stripe and Solid-State EconomicsCars, Excel spreadsheets, vacuum tube-based computers, poorly-implemented recursive programs, and attempts to win at real-time strategy games all break for approximately the same reason: they have lots of moving pieces, and the more moving pieces there are, the easier it is for something to stop working. Over the last half-century or more, across a variety of physical products, mechanical products have been replaced by more efficient, more compact, and much more r...
a market-making project you can do today
Friends,I tweeted something the other day that I want to expand on because it’s one of those ideas that’s simple on the surface but points to an exercise that would teach viscerally market-making. Polymarket has a contract “Will crude oil settle above $90?” It was priced around 73 cents. That’s an implied probability. We also know that the value of a tight call spread around the $90 strike represents a tradeable probability.See a deeper understanding of vertical spreadsIf you price a 89.5/90.5 ...
a cleaner way to compute seasonal vol
Friends,Vivek emailed me a simple question after reading yesterday’s does revenue seasonality translate to vol seasonality? post: Why not just compute volatility from the daily returns within each calendar month instead of using a trailing 20-day window?Um, well, eh. I don’t know. I guess just had a blind spot. I think of rolling realized vol instinctively. But for a seasonality study, it has a problem I already flagged in the post: a big earnings move in August gets recounted ~20 times as the w...
San Francisco Fed President Mary Daly and Richmond Fed President Tom Barkin on What's Actually Happening in the Economy
I sat down with President Mary C. Daly, President and CEO of the San Francisco Federal Reserve, and President Tom Barkin, President and CEO of the Richmond Federal Reserve to talk about the current state of the US economy as we go into 2026. We look back to the past, particularly the 1970s and the 1990s, to understand what those periods can teach us about inflation and policy decisions today. We also talk about the persistent uncertainty we are facing in geopolitics and technology, and the growi...
Chicago Fed President Austan Goolsbee on What the Job Market Is Really Telling Us
It’s never been a more important time to understand the labor market. The Fed is entering a rate cutting cycle, the government shut down, and private players are developing their own numbers to try and close the gap. I sat down with Chicago Fed President Austan Goolsbee to talk about what the Chicago Fed’s new real-time labor market indicators are telling us and how the Fed should navigate a steady-but-thin job market. We also get into how labor-force participation complicates the story, what AI...
Cleveland Fed President Beth Hammack on the Risks Markets Are Missing Right Now
It’s a muddled macro moment: inflation is reheating, labor market data is sending mixed signals, and the debate over Fed independence is getting louder. With potential rate cuts on the table, I sat down with Cleveland Fed President Beth Hammack to talk about why independence matters, what she’s seeing in the data that keeps her leaning modestly restrictive, and how AI is reshaping the entry-level workforce for recent grads. We also get into what the Fed actually does beyond monetary policy, what...
BOOM: Ticketmaster GUILTY of Monopolization
I was going to write about a brewing and important revolt in Hollywood against the Paramount deal, but just now, a jury in New York City ruled on state and Federal charges that Live Nation/Ticketmaster is an illegal monopolist. There were multiple counts involving different markets, including amphitheaters and concert ticketing, as well as state claims. The jury found the company liable on all of them. Ticketmaster’s counsel, Dan Wall, told our correspondent Gigi Liman the company is “disappoint...
Emergency Prices: How Private Equity Captured the Ambulance Market
Dan Geller is a Staff Attorney at Antimonopoly Counsel and can be reached at dan@antimonopoly.us.In 2023, the city of Evanston, Illinois raised its ambulance fee from $1500 to $2000, with a $15 mileage charge tacked on. Like many municipalities, city officials and taxpayers have gotten used to ever-increasing prices for basic services, all bucketed under the “cost of living” crisis we’re dealing with. In fact, yesterday the Michigan University consumer sentiment indicator hit the worst reading i...
BOOM: Senate Votes to Block Private Equity from Buying Homes
Until the Iran war, the main political pressure on President Donald Trump was high prices, particularly on housing and food. So earlier this year, he announced an executive order on a popular policy - banning Wall Street investors from controlling housing. “I am immediately taking steps to ban large institutional investors from buying more single-family homes,” he said, “and I will be calling on Congress to codify it.” I didn’t believe Trump was serious, because he’s generally talked a big game ...