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INTERNATIONAL TRADE WILL CONTINUE TO EXPAND FOR THE next three months, but its growth rate will shrink in the face of political challenges like U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods and the U.K.’s exit from the European Union, according to a forecast released by German transport and logistics giant Deutsche Post DHL Group.

The November version of the quarterly “Global Trade Barometer,” produced for DHL by the consulting firm Accenture, shows a combined global index value of 61 for the seven nations tracked. Index values above 50 indicate a positive growth forecast.

Although the indexes for all seven countries in the study remain above 50 points, the index values have all dropped since the previous edition of the study, which was released in September. The current figures show that the pace of growth over the next three months will be highest in India (with an index of 75), followed by South Korea (64), and the U.S. (61). The other countries tracked are China (58), Japan (58), Germany ( 56), and the U.K. ( 53).

“The DHL Global Trade Barometer clearly shows that the state of global
trade remains solid. Both air and ocean trade continue to grow around the
world,” Tim Scharwath, CEO of DHL Global Forwarding, Freight, said in a
release. “However, given the smoldering trade conflicts, especially between
the U.S. and China, and economists’ expectations that the global economy
could cool down, it is not entirely surprising that trade momentum has
weakened slightly.”
According to the latest DHL report, the predicted deceleration of world-
wide trade growth is attributable to declines in both containerized ocean
freight and international air trade, as markets retreat from an exceptionally
busy year in 2017.

“At the end of the day, we’ll still have growth, but temperatures are getting back to normal in a way,” Scharwath said in an interview. “Global trade has been quite extraordinary in several quarters over the past two years, but businesses like it better when that growth is spread evenly across multiple quarters, rather than having spikes up and down.”

—Ben Ames

Global trade growth to slow in Q1, DHL study predicts

Logistics data and analytics provider Freight Waves will partner with price reporting agency DAT and derivatives exchange and clearing-house Nodal Exchange to create a futures market for trucking, a tool that will allow buyers and sellers to trade financial contracts for freight pricing, helping them hedge their exposure to spot rate volatility, the firms said recently.

Set to launch in late March, the trucking industry’s Freight Futures Exchange is “all about risk mitigation,” according to Craig Fuller, CEO and managing director of Chattanooga, Tenn.-based FreightWaves, who announced the launch during the company’s MarketWaves18 conference in Dallas in November.

The exchange was three years in the making, a product of Fuller’s deep industry experience and research into developing a trucking futures market, which led to the launch of FreightWaves in 2016. The market combines DAT’s benchmark freight pricing data with FreightWaves’ market data to trade on Nodal Exchange, which runs a futures exchange for electricity production and other commodities.

Fuller said the Freight Futures Exchange will help companies ensure price and mitigate their exposure to risk, protecting against upward or downward pressure in the trucking capacity market, where spot rates are volatile. Between January 2016 and January 2018, for exam-