American importers are racing the calendar, and the result is poised to be the busiest month in the history of US container shipping. The NRF and Hackett Associates Global Port Tracker projects 2.47 million TEU will move through US ports in July, the highest monthly total ever recorded, as retailers front-load ahead of an expected August tariff jump. The driver is a hard deadline: temporary Section 122 tariffs of 10% expire on July 24, with a fresh round targeting forced-labo

America's freight railroads shrugged off the Independence Day lull, posting one of the strongest holiday weeks on record and extending a summer boom that is reshaping how goods move across the country. Total US rail traffic for the week ending July 4 reached 482,121 carloads and intermodal units, up 8.7% from the same week a year earlier, according to the Association of American Railroads. The gain was striking given the holiday timing, when shippers and railroads traditional

The battle over who will build America’s next air traffic control system is increasingly becoming a debate over whether foreign-owned companies should have a role in critical national infrastructure. A closer look at the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) priorities reveals the wider landscape shaping the competition, one in which companies such as Leidos and RTX are positioning themselves, and where China’s role is both closely scrutinised and more limited than some cla

The long, strange war over diesel emissions tampering effectively ended this week, not with a rule change but with a presidential signature and a Truth Social post. President Trump pardoned roughly a dozen people convicted under the Clean Air Act for tampering with diesel emissions systems, framing the recipients as small-shop mechanics and tuners persecuted by the Biden administration and punished, in his words, for "fixing their car." A White House official confirmed 11 nam

More than three years after a Norfolk Southern derailment turned East Palestine, Ohio, into shorthand for everything the public fears about freight rail, CSX is betting that the answer to that fear runs through a Jacksonville classroom. The Jacksonville-based carrier announced this week the opening of its Hazardous Materials Training Institute, which it bills as the nation's first railroad-operated hazmat training facility. The site opened June 30 at Florida State College at

A rare collision of geopolitics, trade policy, and peak-season demand has sent ocean freight rates climbing again this week, and the clock driving it is loud. Transpacific spot prices jumped for another week, with Asia to U.S. West Coast and East Coast rates each rising 8 percent, while Asia to North Europe climbed 10 percent and Asia to the Mediterranean 11 percent. The surge is notable because it is defying the usual logic: falling fuel prices are not being reflected in con

The U.S. airline industry is flying its busiest-ever summer straight into a fuel wall, and Wall Street blinked first. Airline shares sold off sharply this week as American Airlines dropped 5 percent, United fell 4 percent, and Delta and JetBlue slipped 3 percent, while the U.S. Global Jets ETF fell 3 percent, confirming a sector-wide event rather than a single-name stumble. The trigger was another jump in crude, driven by renewed Middle East supply fears as fresh U.S.-Iran mi

A federal judge has permanently barred the Trump administration from withholding money for the Gateway Hudson Tunnel Project, delivering a decisive win to New York and New Jersey and lifting the legal cloud that had hung over the largest federal rail investment in modern history. In a June 29 ruling, U.S. District Judge Jeannette A. Vargas vacated the administration's September 2025 funding suspension and permanently enjoined the U.S. Department of Transportation from relying

Washington's decision to let the July 1 review deadline for the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement pass without renewal has injected fresh uncertainty into a freight market that had only just begun climbing out of its longest downturn in industry memory — and executives warn the fallout could take years to settle. The lapse lands at an awkward moment. Cross-border truck freight has been one of the sector's few unambiguous bright spots, with volumes to Mexico surging 23.4 p

Two stories are defining the American airline industry this week, and both trace back to the same brutal truth: the budget model is being remade in real time, and the system underneath it is straining. The first is opportunistic. Starting July 5 and 6, Frontier Airlines began flying eight former Spirit routes, adding 16 new one-way options across popular U.S. markets. The launches include daily Boston-Orlando, Dallas-New Orleans and Detroit-Fort Lauderdale service, with intro

It is not often that House Republicans line up to tell President Trump to stand down. This week they did exactly that, and the fight is over an obscure century-old shipping law that has quietly become one of Washington's sharpest maritime flashpoints. More than 50 Republican lawmakers, led by Speaker Mike Johnson, Oversight Chairman James Comer and Majority Leader Steve Scalise, sent the White House a letter urging the administration to let its sweeping Jones Act waiver expir

The tell in trucking right now is a simple divergence: rates are going up while fuel is going down. When those two lines move in opposite directions, it means one thing, and carriers know it. All-in truckload rates kept climbing through the end of June even as diesel slid another 16 cents to $4.67 a gallon nationally, helped along by softening oil markets after the U.S.-Iran ceasefire. Falling fuel usually hands shippers leverage. Not this time. Demand is outrunning supply, t

The clock is running on the biggest railroad deal in American history, and the next three weeks will tell everyone a great deal about whether it survives. Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern face a July 27 deadline to hand the Surface Transportation Board a fresh trove of supplemental data, the price of admission the regulator set when it accepted their revised $85 billion merger application in late May and promptly parked the proceeding in abeyance. The Board wants sharper an

The French shipping giant CMA CGM has never been shy about its American ambitions. This week it wrote another cheque to prove it. The Marseille-based container line agreed to acquire FedEx Supply Chain, the third-party logistics arm of FedEx Corp, at an enterprise value of $1.4 billion, in a deal announced Wednesday and expected to close in 2026. The unit folds into CEVA Logistics, CMA CGM's contract-logistics subsidiary — and it is no bolt-on. The acquisition would nearly tr

The last day of a fiscal quarter is sacred at Boeing. It is when the planemaker rushes finished jets out the factory door to book the revenue that keeps Wall Street patient. This June 30, the door jammed. A widespread IT outage swept Boeing facilities from Washington State to Florida on Tuesday, significantly disrupting both commercial and military production on the single most financially consequential day of the quarter. The company completed some handovers, but final comme

Delta Air Lines has emerged as the winning bidder for a slice of Spirit Airlines’ former footprint at the world's busiest airport. Court filings show the Atlanta-based carrier offered $12 million to take over gates C4 and C6 at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, along with Spirit's ticketing lobby and associated support space. It is a modest sum for a prize that few airlines ever get their hands on. A Prize Born of Spirit's Collapse The deal follows the low-cos

The largest railroad merger in American history is inching toward a decisive summer, with Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern racing to satisfy federal regulators before a late-July deadline that could shape the future of freight across the continent. The Surface Transportation Board accepted the companies' revised application on 28 May, clearing a procedural hurdle that had tripped them up twice before. But acceptance came with a catch: the Board ruled that key portions of th

The freight downturn that flattened American trucking for the better part of four years is over, and the recovery reshaping the market has almost nothing to do with a surge in demand. Spot truckload rates hit an all-time record in early June, jumping nine cents per mile overnight to $3.83, according to FreightWaves data — the highest figure ever recorded. Contract rates followed. But the story driving those numbers is one of disappearing capacity rather than roaring freight v

US carriers are flying into the busiest summer in aviation history — and quietly bracing for it to break. Airlines for America projects 271 million passengers worldwide between June 1 and August 31, a 6.3% jump over last summer and the highest figure ever recorded. American Airlines alone is preparing to move 75 million customers across roughly 750,000 flights, the busiest summer in its history. This is not, executives insist, a soft demand environment. July international boo

The most consequential development for the US shipping industry this month is unfolding far from American shores — in the Strait of Hormuz, where a fragile reopening is reshaping global oil and container flows just as the domestic freight market hits historic highs. A 14-point US-Iran memorandum signed June 17, dubbed the "Islamabad Memorandum," set up a 60-day negotiating window and began easing the chokepoint that had throttled tanker traffic through the spring. But the unw