Spotlight
Trans-Pacific strength expected to continue
The red-hot trans-Pacific market shows no signs of cooling, with US imports from Asia likely to remain elevated until China’ s Golden Week holiday in the first week of October, multiple ocean carriers and forwarders say. The overheated market and its strength through September would represent a sharp reversal of the general thinking among industry participants from just one month earlier. The expectations then were that imports would begin to decline sharply in August due to the extensive frontloading of fall and holiday merchandise that occurred to avoid US tariff changes implemented at the end of July. Instead, carriers plan to actually boost capacity in September to the West Coast, the latest data shows. While most market players may have failed to gauge how much import demand had built up this summer in the largest US trade lane, contributing to the strength now is the extreme congestion in Shanghai and Ningbo following the most recent in a series of typhoons to hit China, delaying vessel departures by up to 10 days and pushing arrival of those shipments at US ports well into September. The National Retail Federation( NRF), in its Global Port Tracker report, said it expected US imports for August to see a slight gain from July. And while imports for September through November should fall month over month, the figures will show a marginal uptick on a year-over-year basis, NRF said.
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Truckload costs forecast to keep climbing
US truckload shippers already shaken by rate hikes need to brace for further pricing shocks in the fourth quarter, industry analysts warn. They say a sequential, seasonal slip in spot pricing in recent weeks should reverse by the end of the third quarter.“ We will certainly see an increase in industry-wide tender rejections and a higher freight [ rate ] environment as we get toward the other side of Labor Day, and carriers begin positioning for the peak,” said Jared Weisfeld, chief strategy officer at logistics provider RXO. The firm’ s proprietary truckload spot rate index, RXO Curve, finished the second quarter up 32.4 % year over year and is heading toward a 43 % annualized increase for the third quarter. Costs are rising while truckload capacity is shrinking at an historic rate, Weisfeld said as RXO released its third-quarter RXO Curve report. RXO expects capacity to continue to exit the market in the near- to mid-term, he said. Demand seems the only element of trucking costs that hasn’ t been reset.“ We’ re in a bifurcated market, with the AI-driven industrial economy on one side and everything else on the other side,” Weisfeld said, adding that RXO is“ seeing weak macro freight shipments.”
ELD crackdown further crimping capacity
US shippers searching for truck capacity are literally running out of time. The US government is not only targeting non-compliant truck drivers but illegal driving time, cracking down on tampering with electronic logging devices( ELDs) that track driver hours. The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration( FMCSA) has removed about 90 types of ELDs from its list of certified devices over the past two years, and revocations continue, with 15 certifications revoked in the second quarter and five more ELDs removed from the list on Aug. 6. Drivers caught using revoked devices will be subject to out-ofservice orders. Those devices didn’ t meet requirements designed to prevent falsification and manipulation of truck driver hours of service records— the reason FMCSA mandated electronic logging for most commercial truck drivers in the first place. The latest action is another turn of the screw for a truck market already squeezed by an FMCSA crackdown on truck driver licensing, English-language proficiency, driver training schools,“ chameleon” carriers and cabotage by foreign drivers. The impact on truck availability, especially in the truckload sector, has been dramatic, and so has the increase in spot market and contract truckload rates. The crackdown is affecting the intermodal rail and less-than-truckload( LTL) markets, and even cargo crime. Truckload spot rates have risen 40 % or more year over year, and contract rates are expected to hit a 20 % annualized increase by the end of the fourth quarter.
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6 Journal of Commerce | September 7, 2026 www. joc. com