The Cardboard Oracle:
When Recession Signals are Whistling in the Dark
According to a group of former BLS commissioners and experts, “October 2025 will permanently remain a partial blind spot in America’s official record.” For the first time in history, the Federal Reserve is making policy decisions with an entire month of missing data.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics couldn’t collect data during the government shutdown. No household surveys. No price checks. No unemployment rate. The Consumer Price Index for October - the number that determines Social Security adjustments, informs Federal Reserve policy, and anchors countless economic decisions - was never gathered and cannot be recreated. You can’t go back in time to collect prices from stores or ask people if they were looking for work.
But if you know where to look, the real economy leaves other footprints. Alan Greenspan used to track cardboard box production as his favorite real-time indicator. Everything from refrigerators to frozen pizzas travels in corrugated boxes. When manufacturing increases and companies expect to sell more goods, they order more boxes. When they see demand weakening, those orders drop off - often before it shows up in official statistics.
So what are the cardboard boxes telling us right now?
The Boxes Are Screaming
U.S. corrugated box shipments in Q3 2025 fell to their lowest third-quarter level since 2015. That’s a ten-year low, and it came during what should have been peak season as retailers stock up for the holidays.
The industry has shed 9% of its containerboard production capacity in eight months - twice as much as during the 2009 recession. International Paper closed mills in Georgia, eliminating over a thousand jobs. Containerboard production was down 5% year-over-year in Q2, down 3.1% in Q3. Per-capita box use is now more than 20% below its 1999 peak.
“If they’re cutting back on capacity, it likely comes as a response to fewer orders,” wrote Jadrian Wooten, an economist at Virginia Tech. “That would suggest weaker demand in the broader economy.”
When asked what falling box orders mean, Bloomberg analyst Ryan Fox was blunt: companies aren’t ordering boxes because they don’t expect to ship goods.
Three companies now control 65% of the U.S. cardboard box market - the classic oligopoly formation that happens during sustained contraction. Mills are closing. Workers are being laid off. And the boxes that do get made aren’t moving like they used to.
The Trucks Aren’t Moving Either
Trucking tells the same story. The ACT For-Hire Trucking Index sits at 47.0 - anything below 50 indicates contraction. The industry is now in its 13th consecutive quarter of downturn, nearly twice as long as the historical 6-8 quarter average for freight recessions.
Freight volumes remain soft despite a temporary October bump from companies front-loading shipments to beat tariff deadlines. Once that artificial surge passed, both volumes and spot rates dropped back. The Cass Freight Index shows shipments running 4-5% below year-ago levels for most of 2025.
November showed modest gains for some carriers - ArcBest up 3%, Saia up 2.6% - but these are described as gains in a “sluggish market” with “ongoing challenges.” By November’s end, even these modest improvements evaporated. ADP’s weekly employment pulse showed private employers shedding an average of 11,250 jobs per week in late October.
Trucking companies aren’t buying new big rigs. October orders were well below seasonal norms - the peak order season opened but nobody showed up. Small trucking companies, which handle the bulk of freight movement, are failing at accelerating rates.
The trucks and the boxes tell the same story: goods aren’t moving through the economy the way they should.
What We Can See in the Dark
With official government data missing or suspect, we’re left with private alternatives. ADP, which processes payroll for 26 million private-sector workers, offers some visibility into October employment.
The news isn’t good.
October showed 42,000 private sector jobs added - a “tepid” recovery after back-to-back monthly losses, according to ADP’s chief economist. But the composition matters: large companies added 76,000 jobs while small businesses lost 34,000. Since small businesses employ three out of every four American workers, their continued weakness is ominous.
By November, even that modest growth reversed. ADP reported 32,000 private jobs lost - the biggest decline since March 2023 and the largest loss among small establishments. Manufacturing shed 18,000 jobs. Professional and business services lost 26,000. Information lost 20,000.
Truflation, an independent inflation tracker using 14 million data points from 40+ sources, provides another window. With a 0.99 correlation to official CPI and the ability to lead BLS numbers by approximately 45 days, Truflation estimated October inflation around 2.5-2.6% year-over-year, driven by goods inflation and tariff effects.
These alternatives help, but they can’t replace what’s missing. There’s no good proxy for the unemployment rate - ADP tracks payrolls, not who’s looking for work. We’ll never know if unemployment spiked in October or held steady. Producer prices, state and metro employment data, real earnings - all gone for October. A permanent hole in the record.
The Lipstick That Wasn’t There
Perhaps the most telling indicator is what economists call the “lipstick index.” During normal recessions, people cut big purchases like cars and vacations but maintain small indulgences - a $30 lipstick, a latte, cheap thrills that provide psychological comfort during hard times. The lipstick index typically stays flat or even rises during downturns.
Not this time.
All four major beauty conglomerates reported disappointing 2025 sales. The traditional lipstick effect isn’t working. People aren’t just cutting the vacation - they’re cutting the lipstick too. Middle and upper-middle-income households earning $100,000-150,000 are shopping at off-price retailers for beauty products, hunting TikTok deals, trading down to cheaper Korean brands.
When discretionary morale spending drops during economic stress - when people stop buying even the small luxuries that should provide affordable comfort - it signals something different than a typical recession. It means the financial grinding has gone on so long that there’s no fat left to cut. The small luxury buffer has been exhausted.
If even new lipstick feels like a choice between that and rent, you’re not in a normal downturn. You’re watching people who’ve been running on fumes finally run out of fuel entirely.
What the Indicators Are Saying
Put it together:
Cardboard box shipments at ten-year lows. Manufacturing capacity cuts twice what we saw in 2009. Trucking in its 13th quarter of contraction. Small businesses shedding jobs. The lipstick index inverted. All this before the full tariff effects hit. All this before the immigration crackdowns fully impact the labor supply. All this while we’re flying blind through the critical Q4 period with permanent gaps in official data.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates the six-week shutdown reduced Q4 GDP growth by 1-2 percentage points and permanently removed $14 billion from the economy. The BLS has lost 25% of its staff since February. One-third of leadership positions sit vacant.
Private sector alternatives help fill some gaps, but they can’t replace the comprehensive, legally mandated, nationally representative data that federal statistical agencies provide. We’re left reading economic tea leaves at exactly the moment when clarity matters most.
What the boxes and trucks and lipstick are telling us is straightforward: real demand is contracting. Not the headline numbers inflated by higher prices, but actual physical goods moving through the actual economy. The kind of contraction that shows up in freight volumes and box orders and small businesses closing before it shows up in official statistics.
The Federal Reserve meets in December to decide on interest rates. They’ll do it with October’s data permanently missing, November’s data delayed and incomplete, and a fog over the real state of the economy. Meanwhile, the cardboard boxes are screaming, the trucks are sitting idle, and people are choosing between lipstick and groceries.
The official numbers will catch up eventually. They always do. But the leading indicators - the stuff Alan Greenspan watched, the proxies that tell you what’s coming rather than what already happened - those are flashing recession.
Something has to give.
Jamie Mack is an HVAC systems analyst for the US Air Force and writes about politics at The Mongoose. He approaches economic analysis the way he approaches building diagnostics: watch the gauges, trust the instruments, and pay attention when multiple systems start failing simultaneously.
Yep. My chai consumption is way down. 😢