Our colleague, Paul Page, covers supply chains and the logistics industry.

And what's your favorite color?

My favorite color is mauve.

Mauve?

I'm not sure what mauve is, but I just, it's the first thing that came to mind.

Yellow wasn't the first color that came to mind.

Oh, you want to try that again?

No.

Yellow, both a primary color and the name of a major player in the world of logistics, one that's been around for almost a hundred years.

Okay, for people who have not heard of yellow, tell us what it is.

Yellow is one of the biggest truck companies in the United States.

They are sort of the nuts and bolts that moves goods between factories and distribution centers, between distribution centers and stores.

We see their trucks all over the highways, and I know they kind of blend into the background for most people, but they've been sort of a binding force in the American economy.

But over the decades, yellow's business has had a rough ride.

So yellow has been in almost continual, perhaps even periodic crisis, and somehow they've always pulled rabbits out of the hat.

They've somehow managed to survive over time. They've gotten lenders to come in.

They've restructured their finances in some ways, and they've managed to keep things going.

But they've been stepping up to that cliff really over the last 20 years, several times.

And this week, yellow seems to be going over that cliff.

Yellow on Sunday ceased all of its operations. They simply stopped moving freight at all, and they told their unionized workers that they were going to declare for bankruptcy.

This would be the biggest failure of a trucking company ever really.

Welcome to the journal, our show about money, business, and power.

...