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Supply chain pressures cooled down last month, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York said on Friday, but it's possible the benign reading may be the calm before some turbulence arrives, Reuters reported. The bank’s Global Supply Chain Pressure index moved to a reading of -0.15 in December from November’s upwardly revised 0.13. December's negative reading points to below-normal supply chain pressures, which suggests a diminished contribution to inflation pressures. The bank provided no commentary on what drove the latest changes in the index, which returned to negative territory where, save the positive November reading, it's been since February 2023. Supply chain pressures have figured prominently in the debate over inflation drivers for some time. Disruptions in the movement of goods was a key factor pushing the inflation surge that struck in the wake of the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. Supply chain pressures peaked in December 2021 when the New York Fed index stood at a record 4.33, and have moved down fairly steadily since that point, which has in turn also tracked a retreat in inflation pressures.

Just over half of the millions of borrowers who received their first federal student loan bills in years in October — after the pandemic freeze ended — have paid the bills, the Education Department said on Friday, the New York Times reported. Forty-three million borrowers collectively owe the government $1.6 trillion in student loan debt. In March 2020, as the coronavirus pandemic roiled the nation’s economy, President Donald J. Trump’s administration imposed a freeze on collections as an emergency relief measure. The moratorium was extended nine times by Congress, Mr. Trump and his successor, President Biden — until this fall, when it finally ended. Officials had long warned that getting borrowers accustomed to paying again after such a long break would be a rocky process, especially after the Supreme Court in June overturned Mr. Biden’s $400 billion plan to forgive up to $20,000 in debt per borrower. Tens of millions of people would have benefited from that relief. Instead, 22 million people had to make their first payment in years in October as the government restarted its collection machinery. Sixty percent of them paid the bill by mid-November, according to James Kvaal, the Education Department’s under secretary. (Borrowers who are still in school or recently left do not yet owe on their debts. Also, some borrowers’ payment deadlines were extended because of loan servicing errors.) That leaves nearly nine million borrowers who had payments due but have not yet made them. Many people “will need more time,” Mr. Kvaal said Friday in a written statement. “Some are confused or overwhelmed about their options.”

Yellow, the trucking company that shut down its operations and filed for bankruptcy protection this summer, on Wednesday rejected a trucking executive’s bid to buy and restructure its business, the New York Times reported. In a letter sent to the prospective buyer, Yellow’s lawyers contended that the bid was “not viable,” saying they had not gotten any indication that the bid had the support of the company’s creditors, including the Treasury Department, which had made an emergency loan to the company during the pandemic. The letter also said that the plan to revive Yellow underestimated the costs and difficulties of such an effort. The bid would not be “confirmable by a bankruptcy court or in the best interests of Yellow’s stakeholders,” the letter said. Yellow’s management intends to soon complete its own bankruptcy plan, which involves selling off the company’s assets to different buyers. The company this week released the results of an auction in which the winning bidders committed to spend nearly $1.9 billion on 128 terminals, Yellow’s most valuable assets. On Dec. 12, the company plans to seek approval for the sales from a federal bankruptcy judge in Delaware.

Trucking company XPO Inc. won a bid to buy 28 service centers of bankrupt Yellow Corp for $870 million in a closely watched auction of the nearly 100-year-old firm's assets, Reuters reported. Yellow, formerly known as YRC, filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in August after blaming the International Brotherhood of Teamsters union for its demise. The company was one of the nation's largest so-called less-than-truckload carriers in the U.S. and owned about 12,000 trucks and 35,000 trailers and its customers included Walmart and Home Depot. XPO expects the deal, which is subject to court approval, to add to core profit in 2024 and adjusted profit per share from continuing operations from 2025, according to a filing on Tuesday. The deal will add "significant footprint in areas where XPO was previously capacity constrained, the path towards the company's 2027 goals," said Jonathan Chappell, analyst at Evercore ISI. The company has also entered into an $870 million credit agreement which it may use to finance a deal it said would help optimize routes for its less-than-truckload transportation in North America.

The bankruptcy estate of Bed Bath & Beyond has filed the largest-ever lawsuit with the Federal Maritime Commission, seeking around $300 million from Mediterranean Shipping Co. for allegedly overcharging to move its cargo during the pandemic, the Wall Street Journal reported. The bankrupt retailer wants Geneva-based MSC, the world’s largest boxship operator in terms of capacity, to pay around $150 million for damages and an equal sum for what it described as exploitative and coercive behavior. Complaints by American companies are handled by the FMC, the U.S. maritime regulator. Bed Bath & Beyond filed for bankruptcy protection in April, after years of losses. It subsequently closed all of its stores and sold its brand to Overstock.com, which has taken on the Bed Bath & Beyond name. The bankrupt estate changed its legal name to DK Butterfly. The 36-page lawsuit said MSC’s performance in 2021 was “abysmal” and details how the retailer had to pay high freight rates in the spot market to get its goods shipped. It also claims that MSC failed to meet its contractual obligations in terms of pricing along with saddling the retailer with surcharges.

Jack Cooper Transport, a specialized operator that hauls automobiles for carmakers, plans to submit a bid backed by $1 billion in financing and support from the Teamsters union and some U.S. lawmakers that would halt the liquidation of trucking giant Yellow and seek to resurrect the shuttered business, the Wall Street Journal reported. The improbable effort would require the Treasury Department to defer repayment for several years of a $700 million loan provided to Yellow under a COVID pandemic-era bailout, one of several debts that helped push one of the country’s biggest truckers into collapse earlier this year. The Jack Cooper Transport bid would provide about $1 billion to pay off other secured creditors, offer unsecured creditors shares in the business and hire back some of the 22,000 Teamsters members that lost their jobs when the company shut down over the summer, according to the people familiar with the matter. It would restore operations under a new, leaner company and seek to win back freight business that has dispersed to other carriers. The effort comes as the sale of Yellow’s sprawling network of trucking terminals and tens of thousands of trucks and trailers is moving through U.S. Bankruptcy Court. The bankruptcy process has a deadline Thursday for submission of bids for real-estate assets, with a minimum of $1.525 billion already set for the land and buildings ahead of an auction scheduled for Nov. 28. That would be enough to repay the company’s secured creditors, including the $700 million federal loan, and to cover wages and other payments owed to laid off workers.