BMO Sale Ends Trucking Credit Transparency as Diesel Prices Surge

The sale of BMO's transportation lending unit to private equity firm Stonepeak represents a significant loss for supply chain transparency. For six to seven years, FreightWaves has tracked BMO's quarterly disclosures of trucking loan write-offs, provisions, and impaired assets, metrics that provided rare insight into the health of carrier credit across market cycles. With Stonepeak's acquisition expected to close in Q4, that window into trucking credit quality will likely close, removing one of the few public benchmarks for assessing sector-wide financial stress.

Timing adds intrigue: BMO's gross impaired loans have improved substantially to $440 million from over $500 million, suggesting the bank is exiting near a cyclical trough. This mirrors broader softening in trucking credit stress after a brutal downturn where write-offs once reached $43 million in a single quarter. Meanwhile, diesel fuel costs have become a compounding pressure, hitting their highest levels since Middle East military operations began, with prices climbing 40 cents per gallon in just one month while refinery maintenance schedules and drone attacks on Russian facilities threaten further tightness.

For supply chain professionals, this convergence of events signals rising operational risk ahead. The loss of transparent lending data coincides with improving but still-elevated carrier vulnerability and fuel cost volatility, precisely the moment when visibility into freight market health matters most. Carriers operating on thin margins face both credit tightening (as lenders pull back) and fuel surcharge pressure, while shippers lose the ability to track these risks through public data.