Judging from their actions, ocean carriers would love to toss out those irritating economics textbooks, with their tedious lessons about supply and demand. Too much capacity? No pricing discipline? Sluggish volume growth? Forget about it. Why should any of that prevent them from raising freight rates?

One could say that transportation faces multiple hurdles in the coming year, in the guise of new regulations and legislation that promise to have a serious impact on all modes. Me? I prefer to think of it as a minefield.

So collaborative purchasing appears feasible for the restaurant industry. But what about other business sectors? Can different companies - even direct competitors - really band together to get better deals from their suppliers?

It seems like a cruel joke. At the same time we hear about the return of manufacturing jobs from Asia to the U.S., we are inundated with stories about the growth of robotics, which threatens to take away those very jobs for good.

Is it a waste of time to make economic forecasts? Even the most respected prognosticators are wrong as often as they're right. And the most sweeping changes? Hardly anyone ever sees them coming.

I've spent the last couple of posts urging procurement executives not to focus solely on price when they're choosing suppliers. Service, product quality, financial health, social responsibility and exposure to natural disasters and other potential disruptions are all elements that need to be factored into the mix. So you'd think this enlightened attitude would pretty much rule out the use of auctions for selecting vendors, right?

The notion of a "chief procurement officer" isn't new. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has had one since 1998, and the title can be found in any number of other government agencies and branches of the military. Private companies have embraced it as well, although the position hasn't enjoyed a solid footing in most C-suites for more than a decade or so. Maybe it was the success of companies like Apple, with its mastery of supply management, that convinced top executives of the need to elevate procurement to the highest levels of the organization.

As if corporations didn't have enough money sitting idle in their accounts today - now we learn that they've been borrowing aggressively, spurred on by record-low interest rates.

A few weeks back I referenced the work of Robert J. Gordon, an economist and professor at Northwestern University. In a paper published last September for the Centre for Economic Research, he laid out the history of the first three industrial revolutions. And he asked whether a fourth, supposedly driven by the internet and other advances in information technology, could come anywhere near its predecessors in terms of productivity improvements.

The holidays are supposed to be a time of joy, but given the state of the economy and other recent events, it's hard to feel positive about much of anything right now - least of all the outlook for transportation policy reform. So why is Joshua Schank, president and chief executive officer of the Eno Center for Transportation, "more optimistic than I have been in a long time" about the prospects for funding critical infrastructure improvements?