Americans Are About to Get a Lot Richer

Added: 2026-05-31

[00:00:00]I stumbled into a very interesting set of data, a thread to pull to keep pulling. Surely it would turn into a dead end, but over and over and over again, it kept returning me to the exact same place. This video was sponsored by Tasty Trade. More on them later. This is the most important signal in America right now, the flatbed truck. No walls, no ceiling, just one space 53 feet long, 11 and a half feet wide. Anything can be put on it. Thieves can easily get to whatever it's carrying. Can't keep lettuce at the right temperature. Rain or snow, the cargo is getting wet. It's really not the best way to move 90% of cargo around the country. So why on earth is it almost impossible to book one? The answer is what led me to say this during a presentation.

[00:00:41]I've never been this bullish on the United States economy before. It all started with a tweet.

[00:00:47]Here we go again with the industrial renaissance talk. Been hearing these words for years.

[00:00:50]I mean, this has been the promise of every politician for over a decade.

[00:00:53]The idea being that all the U.S. does is buy stuff from other countries. It comes from overseas, into the ports and gets pushed into main street America, a fragile situation that leaves the consumer America at the whim of whoever it's buying stuff from. The idea being America was going to start making things again. We were going to usher in an industrial renaissance.

[00:01:13]So it wasn't those two words that got me to stop. It was these, freight data. Why would those words make me pause? Do what I do long enough and become second nature to break things down into two categories. What people say and what people do.

[00:01:27]People can say anything. It means almost nothing. You interpret what's the spin.

[00:01:31]What are they trying to accomplish? But what people do, that cannot be faked.

[00:01:38]We're bringing manufacturing back to the United States.

[00:01:42]We're paying truckers twice what we were six months ago.

[00:01:46]If the price to hire a trucker has doubled, then companies are choosing to pay that price.

[00:01:51]There's actually a term for this, revealed preference. When Netflix announced it was ending password sharing, their response was exactly what you thought it would be.

[00:01:58]I am canceling. But within days of the rollout, Netflix had its four single largest days of signups ever, revealing people's preference of actually paying for Netflix over not having it at all. Freight data lives in this world. It cannot be faked. It is not words. If companies are choosing to pay that much more to move stuff, something is up. Okay.

[00:02:18]Maybe there are fewer trucks on the road. The fewer the trucks, the more they could charge. I know for my perfectly curated ex-feed, well curated ex-feed, is a superpower that there has been a crackdown on licenses for commercial truck drivers. Yes, it appears it's a very small part of it. All right. That's not it.

[00:02:38]Certainly not enough to explain these numbers. Diesel, that's it. The cost of fuel. If fuel gets more expensive, truckers are going to charge more. Oil's been on tear, going to over $100 a barrel recently. That might be enough to move numbers like this.

[00:02:51]Wait, no. That only accounts for 24 cents is 8%. Here it is. This is really it. It's got to be tariffs, right? Companies bringing stuff into the country as much as they could as fast as they can. Tariffs have been in and out of the courts. Tariffs have been up and down. This must just be all the stuff companies ordered months ago arriving at the ports. No, that cannot be right. What? That can't be. That is impossible. Hey, I want to make sure that I am seeing these numbers right. Would you be able to come in and chat? I'll be over shortly. Great. I'll see you in a bit. This is probably the most exciting economy in terms of watching this in real time.

[00:03:32]This is the great thing about freight data, is you get to see the truth. This is Craig Fuller.

[00:03:36]He's the freight aficionado. Ten years ago, we built the company Freight Waves, which is the industry standard platform used by thousands of companies, big and small, that move freight or need their freight moved. He has a front row seat to the best data on what's happening in the world of moving things around the country. And he's also a great Twitter follow.

[00:03:54]Usually what happens is the coasts sort of heat up first. So transactions, tender rejections increase off the coast. Volumes increase off the coast. You could watch Los Angeles. You could watch Savannah, Georgia. You could watch Newark and you could see the country. Freight comes into the coast and the coast would heat up. And a couple of weeks later, it would end up in the center of the country. Keep an eye on where freight activity is happening in the US. And for the past three decades, the US map reliably looked like this. The coasts are the hotspots. America buys from other countries. That stuff gets to the ports and slowly makes its way into the rest of the country. But the map of today looks like this. Red hot in the middle of the country, exactly where you would not expect it. And exactly why I wanted to talk to Craig. When we look at what's happening at the coast, is there almost not even participating in this freight market. But the center of the country, and I call it the I-35 corridor, the old rust belt, and down to Texas in the south, that part of the country is starting to light up.

[00:04:53]And we're seeing demand surge, volume surge, and rejections absolutely go hyperbolic, the economic heart of America. So we're going from the center of the country receiving freight to the center of the country driving freight. And it's remarkable because it tells us that the industrials, that the activity is actually working.

[00:05:18]Like a cable passing electricity from the plug to your phone, freight passes stuff from one business to the next, each step transforming what it received and sending it along. It is the pipes taking ore from the mine to the smelter, steel sheets from the smelter to the factory, factory to construction site. If it's not the ports that are responsible for all of this freight activity, if it's the middle of the country, there is only one explanation. Every section of pipe is full. Freight is bringing in the raw materials to factories and then having to take whatever the factory does with those raw materials and get it to customers. What's getting to the warehouse is leaving the warehouse, forcing the factory to hire yet another truck to get more stuff to the warehouse. 50% of all flatbed loads are being rejected.

[00:05:59]Consumer products do not move on flatbeds. Like nobody's getting a flatbed to their house.

[00:06:03]Amazon's not delivering flatbed. You see them going on the highway and they've got rolls of steel or equipment or lumber. That's what a flatbed is. It doesn't have a box around it.

[00:06:12]That is the industrial trucking. The flatbed didn't survive into 2026 because nobody got around to inventing something better. It survived because there's a class of cargo that simply cannot be put inside a box. It was the original. The flatbed in 1898, four wheels and a deck, as simple as it gets. Walls and a roof were added in the 20s. Once trucking companies started to compete with railroads, bringing in the drive and category. Refrigeration in the 30s became something you could add to the drive and box. And now you had the reefer, refrigerated truck, food, produce, whatever needed cold. There's about 450,000 active flatbed trucks in the United States that are basically available for dispatch. It takes about a week to maybe two weeks at most for a temporary phenomenon to resolve itself because the trucks can move.

[00:06:55]They're very pneumatic. And the industry is hyper reactive to these conditions. Like you don't sit trucks. This is not a temporary phenomenon. This is not a situational phenomenon.

[00:07:06]This is fundamental. Our economy, our industrial economy is cooking and it is remarkable because we haven't seen that in 20 years. It's hard to believe. It is hard to believe because we were told last year or for the last couple of years that industrialization is coming back. And last year it didn't. It was abysmal. The industrial economy was absolutely trash last year.

[00:07:28]It felt as if we were going completely in the wrong direction. But then something happened.

[00:07:58]One of the things that goes missed with the hyperscalers spending on all this stuff, their capex spend is in this really roundabout way. It's this giving back of all the cash they've made over the years that they're still making to raise each other to provide better AI. And in doing that, two things are happening. First, they're dumping tons of cash into all these other areas that have not moved like this in a very long time. Cash that drove their stock prices higher and higher. The revenue per employee that they had was staggering still is high. But now they're in a race to, as they see it, survive. Forced to spend a previously unthinkable amount of money to compete. If 10 years ago, these CEOs had gone in front of their board and said, listen, in 2026, we're going to spend $150 billion in data center build out, the board would have told them to kick rocks. The second thing that's happening, anybody that is using AI from the heavy to light users, it costs these companies way more to give you what you use than whatever it is you pay. We can call it consumer surplus subsidies, whatever term you want to use for you're getting more than you pay for. The world's knowledge, it's been scraped up, compacted down and given to everyone for the price of on the house. Have you ever heard of the term black swan? A rare bird upon the earth and exceedingly like a black swan meant something so impossible it didn't exist. Uttered by a Roman poet and then used over and over again for 1500 years with the same certainty as declaring the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. Until halfway around the world from where they called home, 250 men spread out across a convoy of three ships stumbled onto something all of Europe thought was impossible. The river they had entered on the west coast of Australia was thick with black swans. Two eyes locking onto the black feathers was all it took to immediately invalidate a certainty that had never been questioned. Millions of swans seen by millions of eyes had always been white. This is the average height of everyone on the planet. Put a dot down on the chart for the height of every person on the planet and 80% of them will cluster between these two lines. Extremely short people or extremely tall people will fall to the side of them but no dot will ever be placed all the way out here. No one is 100 feet tall. We know the sun will rise, the light will turn green, babies will be born, people will pass away. It doesn't usually snow in May but it's happened before. Have a way to track everything all the way down to what that leaf will do when it twists in the breeze and the absolute best way to not lose money would be to bet that the next thing to happen will fall somewhere under this line. Until that one thing no one thought possible didn't even consider exposes this belief to be false. The next dot lands so far outside of what anybody assumes possible and the world shakes. A plane has crashed into one of the towers of the World Trade Center. These are the black swans everyone remembers. Fear, uncertainty, panic, shaken, easy to remember, easy to see. They feel heavy, they feel important, they are.

[00:11:12]But there's another kind of black swan, a more powerful kind.

[00:11:17]The bombs were bad, bullets were lethal, but that was not what caused one in five deaths during World War II. A very messy man had left his office on vacation, stacked books, general disarray, and a handful of petri dishes in the corner. Not interesting, not interesting, nothing of note, nothing of hold on, that is interesting. Why would that happen?

[00:11:38]A speck of mold from three floors below the man's lab had floated up through the cracks in the floor and landed remarkably almost dead center in the middle of a petri dish he hadn't put away, leaving a curious looking ring spreading out from its edges, a blast radius that had killed the bacteria around it. A true black swan, the discovery of penicillin that landed in exactly zero headlines, zero breaking news reports, pneumonia, a chest cold, surgery, cuts, scrapes, bullet wounds, the profound impact of being able to cure a simple infection. To top it off, the perfect mold used to manufacture penicillin at high volume was found decades later on a cantaloupe in Illinois. In the final year of World War II, the one in five deaths occurring from infection had dropped to less than one in one hundred, hundreds of millions of lives safe since, an event that sits on the left side of the event curve, positive black swans.

[00:12:26]We can quibble about what is and isn't a black swan, a favorite pastime of the stats and math people. Was this or that actually predictable? Sure, the guys that flew the planes into the Twin Towers on 9-11 knew what was coming. Sure, a handful of people told the banks their risk models were wrong before the housing crash. Pick your hue of black swan for each event.

[00:12:45]But nobody predicted the internet. Nobody predicted the wheel, penicillin, the steam engine, car, photography. Nobody predicted this tweet. That one of the worst named products in the history of products is something everyone on the planet is familiar with and that most people on the planet have tried in some form or another. This blue line is the internet. Yellow is chat GPT. The start of each line is anchored to when these things first became available to the public.

[00:13:11]The higher the line, the more productive the U.S. is, the actual official measurement of productivity, doing more with the same amount of effort or to be precise, the same amount of inputs. The gap between the two, that is the interesting part. The chat GPT line is already significantly higher than the internet. We're becoming more productive at a faster rate than when the internet came out. And we all know how important the internet has been.

[00:13:34]But let's not get ahead of ourselves. This could be noise. It could be something else. You cannot look at this and definitively say AI is making us more productive. But it might be. If this trend keeps up, if it mirrors in any way or if it surpasses what the internet did, it would be very hard to view this as anything but bullish for not just America, but the world. So we have this thing that came out right as the U.S., it turns out, decided to start building stuff again. Big tech is dumping fuel on top of that already burning fire. The middle part of the country, the information part of the country, all firing, all working at the same time. This is not something we've really seen in my lifetime. The middle of the country has been on a downward trajectory for my entire life. For whatever reason, it may not feel like good is happening, like what you would expect it to feel like. With all of this data that we are seeing, the people on the coasts can't really feel the middle of the country, the signal of the stock market that we are also tied to. More than 60% of Americans have money in the stock market.

[00:14:27]Most of it tied up in the 10 or so companies spending more than they want to to fight each other. The other companies don't make headlines. They don't really make the line on the chart go up very fast. But that fighting plus all the other building is spreading a lot of money all across the country. So I'll say it again. I've never been this bullish on the United States economy before. So bumps along the way, sure, perfection, definitely not. But the trend, this is worth taking time to think on. And I haven't even touched on the third thing, a truly major black swan. Nobody predicted that rockets would land themselves. An entirely new frontier is opening up, like when the Europeans learned how to build ships that could cross oceans or the railroads being laid west across the US. But that is for another video, the next video.

[00:15:10]All right, let's do this. As always, it is time for the things that didn't quite make the final cut, but that I still think are worth sharing. The footnotes. One, the US, it's essentially a massive island surrounded by huge bodies of water that make it hard to get the one thing it's a washing to anybody else, natural gas. Can't do pipelines across the ocean. Canada and Mexico already have plenty of it. It is actually more energy dense than crude oil. It's what generates the majority of electricity in most countries, including the US. It's what factories want. And it's about 15 times cheaper here than it is in Europe and Japan, about four times cheaper than China. Here's Craig. There is a movement of building out pipelines and infrastructure that is going to drive continued development. And I think the energy story is probably our greatest, greatest story of the next decade. 40% of the cost of heavy manufacturing is energy. Energy is more important than labor. So everyone's like, we outsource because of cheap labor. Yeah, if you're selling something, this is the reason Germany has become such an industrial basket case is because they decommissioned all their energy. Like it was an industrial powerhouse.

[00:16:11]It has always been that way, but it has its economy is stunted because they decided to decommission energy supplies. And the United States has not done that. For all of the errors we've done towards our economy, energy is probably the greatest gift that we could have been given. So energy being an input into making anything, this is a pretty big deal. Is it enough to offset the other high costs of making things in the US? No, but it's not nothing either. And it's stable. The last thing a company wants is to pencil out the math on a new factory, only to find out that three years later, the cost of energy is five times higher. Number two, it's not just flatbed trucks. It's not just trucking freight. Rail freight is jumping at the same time. Chemical and grain shipments are hitting 20-year and all-time high numbers.

[00:16:53]This is a slide on Caterpillar from the original presentation. Backlog at all-time highs, revenue jumping with it, and look where their factories are. The industrials are kicking, new core steel, John Deere, Archer Daniels, Generac Eaton. It's much more than Caterpillar.

[00:17:07]Number three, I mentioned space. Obviously, everyone knows AI is doing really well. But very soon, if you're not already hearing about it, robotics will be stepping onto the main stage.

[00:17:16]That will be yet one more major thing to add to the major things that are happening, West.

[00:17:21]This is a unique time. Now, if I would be able to ask for your help, four out of five people who regularly watch Maxonomics videos are not subscribers to the channel. If you enjoy these, if you get value out of them, please, if I could ask you to consider hitting the subscribe button, we would love to do more videos, considering doing live events, all sorts of things. And the number of subscribers really does provide me with the ability to greenlight things and rally support around producing more stuff. So thank you very much for watching. Big video coming out on SpaceX and how the unlocking of new frontiers like space is one of the most reliable creators of wealth for as long as humans have been doing it.

[00:17:57]So I will see you when that video comes out. Have a good one.