State of Freight: September 2025
The current freight market feels like a group project where everyone’s waiting for someone else to do the work.
Tariffs, weak jobs, and warehouses stuffed with overpriced inventory are all weighing things down.
Let’s break it down in this month’s freight market update, brought to you by our resident logistics geeks: Henry Byers, Beau King, and Sam Buffler.
Panic buying meets regret buying
Manufacturers tried to get ahead of tariffs by stockpiling raw materials, which worked about as well as buying 50 frozen pizzas before a diet.
Imports jumped, exports fell, and now warehouses are full of stuff customers don’t want to pay inflated prices for.
Imports (July): +7.1%
Exports (July): -0.1%
Industrial supply imports: +25.4% (because panic is a great motivator)
Investments have all but completely frozen, which means companies are idling instead of building.
Oceanside off-ramp
Ocean shipping is the ultimate “bought high, selling low” story.
Importers front-loaded orders ahead of tariffs, paying peak rates in July, only for freight costs to crater in August. Now, businesses are stuck selling expensive inventory to customers suddenly allergic to high prices:
Port of LA throughput (July): +35% YoY
Ocean freight rates (August): multi-year lows
Pass-through of costs to customers: only 21% successful
Ocean rates are now at multi-year lows, but the stuff bought at July’s “tariff panic” prices is still choking the system.
Congrats, ocean shippers: you basically just experienced the supply chain version of buying Bitcoin at the top.
The soy boys are hurting
Farmers are in trouble. China, our main soybean customer, has placed zero orders for the new season.
Instead, they’ve decided that the grass is greener (and cheaper) in Brazil. That leaves $12.8 billion in beans from the Midwest with nowhere to go.
As a result:
Agriculture equipment investment Q1: -20% YoY
Agriculture equipment investment Q2: -14% YoY
U.S. soybeans for China this year: 0
Trucking is stuck in eternal purgatory
The market isn’t collapsing, but it’s not moving forward either.
Truckload demand: ~15% below 2024
Outbound tender rejections: +25% YoY
Spot rates: drifting between “steady enough” and “wishful thinking,” but finally moving more in sync with rejections
Cass Shipments Index (July): -6.9% YoY (down from -2% in June), with August projected closer to -8%
Flatbed searches were the hottest item on CarrierSource, but that’s mostly because everything else was boring. Project freight searches dipped over Labor Day, but should rebound as year-end deadlines creep up.
Fuel stayed boring in a good way, with diesel holding steady around $3.70/gallon since July, keeping at least one headache off carriers’ plates.
The verdict?
The U.S. economy is like a car sputtering in second gear, pretending it can still merge into highway traffic with completely blowing the transmission.
Manufacturing isn’t bleeding as badly, trucking isn’t collapsing (it’s just kinda… wilting), and ocean rates are technically cheap if you didn’t buy your stuff two months ago at panic pricing.
Final grade: C+. Stable enough to function, shaky enough to make everyone uncomfortable.
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