We are familiar with the fact that the Suda Simmons Group has been established for more than 100 years, but Simmons, a large American mattress manufacturer, announced that it will file for bankruptcy in January 2023, and many people may not know that Simmons is a business. Thinking that the mattress at home is Simmons shows how deeply rooted its brand is, and this is just the beginning.
US transportation giant Yellow Group suddenly announced its closure at the end of July and immediately ceased operations. This collapse event is the largest in the history of the US trucking industry, and it is also the most representative and thrilling scene in the current wave of US corporate closures.
The biggest wave of defaults and bankruptcies in 13 years is sweeping the United States, and the bankruptcy of well-known companies like Yellow is nothing new. Data from international rating agency Moody's shows that from the beginning of this year until June 15, a total of 62 corporate bond issuers in the institutional rating system defaulted on their bonds. The wave of defaults directly fueled the wave of bankruptcy.
Data from another international rating agency, S&P, showed that as of June 22, 324 large U.S. companies, mainly listed companies, had filed bankruptcy filings, approaching last year's total of 374 in less than half a year.
Yellow, a century-old enterprise, has collapsed, and the first reason is that under the epidemic, the decline in global manufacturing output and trade, coupled with the sluggish consumer demand in the United States, directly led to a decline in demand for truck container transportation services. In the first quarter of this year, U.S. container imports fell nearly 23% year-on-year, and the producer price index (PPI) for long-haul trucking services fell 7.3% from its peak in March last year.
The underlying logic is that high inflation has led to rising prices, putting transportation companies under tremendous operating pressure. In the context of inflation, drivers and other employees are demanding salary increases, the cost of daily management of enterprises is also increasing, while the supply of goods of transportation enterprises is seriously insufficient, and the actual revenue is declining, and the ensuing operational risks make it difficult for enterprises to sustain.
One of the landmark events was the sudden declaration of bankruptcy by Silicon Valley Bank on March 11. The 40-year-old financial institution went from standing tall to bowing down in less than three days. This is the largest financial institution failure in the United States since the 2008 financial crisis, and the second largest bank failure in the history of the United States. Some people believe that the thunder explosion of Silicon Valley Bank was "mistakenly injured" by the Fed, and the Fed's continuous interest rate hike is an important trigger, which just reveals the excessive deviation of the Fed's monetary policy goals and the loss of one or the other.
Under the scourge of interest rate hikes, the financial industry bore the brunt, and the manufacturing industry was also doomed.
Although Yellow has a super volume of more than 12,000 trucks, transports goods to retail giants such as Walmart, Home Depot and Uber Freight throughout the United States, provides transportation and logistics services to more than 800,000 customers around the world, and once had annual sales of $9.5 billion, which is "too big to fail", due to the accumulation of various uncertainties, the company will eventually fail to fail.
In the eyes of the world, the US GDP has grown by leaps and bounds, but I did not expect that problems are also endless. Now the mainland's economy also has one or another problem, mainly insufficient vitality, real estate industry sluggish, insufficient export momentum, etc., not worse than bad, Western countries led by the United States are struggling with high inflation, the reduction of external demand is the key to our sluggish foreign trade, now some people do not have a clear understanding of the external situation, economic fluctuations, did not think of how to get through the difficulties together, but complained, full of anger.
Complaining and saying strange things will not solve any problem, now is the critical period of the Sino-US game, everyone should calm down, down-to-earth to solve the problem, overcome the need to rely on the thinking, unite and look forward, and survive this difficult period.