How This Freight Cycle Could Last

Freight’s cycle-ending forces are still stacking up, but Reliance Partners’ Chief Revenue Officer Thom Albrecht sat down with us to discuss why this one might last.

Nearly 360 trucking, freight brokerage, and insurance professionals packed the Grand Hyatt Nashville for the 5th Annual Trucking Matters Seminar Series, Reliance Partners’ largest turnout yet for an event that started with 160 attendees in its first year.

Over two days, the agenda moved from federal safety policy to cargo theft, credit risk, and the future of freight brokerage. The event opened, as it has in years past, with Albrecht’s signature freight, capacity, and economic update. Albrecht split his presentation into two parts.

The first was a traditional read on the health of the consumer and businesses, along with the broader economy. The second, framed as “a tale of two cities,” dug into the structural overhaul reshaping trucking capacity and why he believes the industry may be entering a freight cycle unlike any in the past two decades. The economic data paints a mixed picture.

Inflation-adjusted wages had strung together 35 straight months of gains after a brutal 25-month stretch of declines until April and May of this year turned negative again. Consumers are still climbing out of a purchasing-power hole. Category-level inflation is an even messier story than the approximately 3. 5% headline CPI figure suggests.

As of the 5th Annual Trucking Matter Seminar, Gasoline was up 26. 7% year over year even as it fell nearly 10% in June alone; lettuce and tomatoes were up 23. 8%; coffee climbed 18. 5%. Meanwhile, bacon, used vehicles, and eggs were all down on a year-over-year basis.

Savings rates, sitting near 3% against a historical average north of 8%, left little cushion. Credit card delinquencies at 90 days had climbed back to 7. 1%, still shy of the Great Financial Crisis peak but well above the lows of early 2022. Business demand, Albrecht noted, was not robust, but better than in 2025.

Customer inventories remained near survey-history lows. That’s good news for freight creation as this year’s replenishment freight has been steadier than a year ago. AI-related capital spending, meanwhile, accounted for nearly 70% of first half 2026 GDP growth.

Strip out AI, tech, and government spending, and the rest of the economy actually contracted slightly in Q1 and barely grew in Q2. Housing has been “stuck” for nearly four years.

Existing home sales per 1,000 households had fallen to roughly 26, well below the 44-59 range of the 2000s and 2010s, with affordability consuming an estimated 43% of household disposable income against a more affordable level around 30%.

“A Tale of Two Cities,” a reference to the Dickens line “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” set the tone for the conference. Fraudulent and non-compliant carriers, Albrecht argued, had been thriving for years while compliant fleets absorbed the cost of doing things the right way.

His data backed it up: compliant carriers operate at roughly $2. 38 a mile once insurance, payroll, drug testing, legal CDLs, and maintained equipment are factored in, versus roughly $1. 65 a mile for carriers who cut those corners. That means a non-compliant 50-truck motor carrier has up to a $6.

5 million cost advantage compared to a compliant 50-truck fleet. Newly registered DOT numbers for for-hire, interstate, general freight carriers had exploded from a 2010-2019 yearly average of 9,760 to a 2020-2025 average of 36,658, with nearly 60,000 new registrations in 2025 alone.

Albrecht’s presentation flagged the telltale signs of the fraud driving those numbers. Carrier phone numbers like 123-456-7890 and 867-5309, single addresses housing hundreds of “trucking companies,” and CDL mills with advertisements in various languages are all recognizable patterns.

Albrecht highlighted that there are still CDL schools advertising obtaining a CDL without English proficiency. Even today, there are several real examples visible online. Albrecht’s Thoughts on the Potential of a Trucking “Super Cycle” During the motor carrier panel discussion, Albrecht made the case that this cycle could break from trends in recent history.

Freight cycles are typically defined as sustained stretches of rising rates followed by contraction. Albrecht defines a super cycle as one that runs longer than two years and one in which pricing is much stronger than CPI, if not double-digit. The industry hasn’t cleared that threshold since the cycle that lasted from mid-2003 to the fall of 2006.

The 2013-2014 and 2017-2018 cycles both petered out after roughly 18 months, and each was tied to a single regulatory catalyst (an Hours of Service change in the former, the ELD mandate in the latter). And even the recovery after the housing collapse lasted less than 20 months, albeit without any trucking regulatory changes.

This cycle has the potential to be different, Albrecht argued, because it isn’t riding on one rule change. He also acknowledged