Well, this doesn’t bode well. We kicked off 2026 with January printing shipments coming in at $7.08 billion, down from December’s $7.19 billion. And indeed that is the worst January since at least 2013—and likely ever. Given our usual seasonality, we’re dreading February’s numbers.

2025 had its challenges macroeconomically—specifically, the tariffopalooza—and now the Iran War, which is raising the cost of oil, thus gas (the national average cost of a gallon of gas is currently $4.50, up from $3.20 a year ago), and thus everything that uses gas (shipping, for example) is also up. Since many items other than gas also are shipped through the embattled Strait of Hormuz, a prolonged war will disrupt supply chains, and we all remember from 2022 what happened when supply chains got disrupted. In our just-released Printing Outlook 2026–27, “pricing pressures and price erosion” was our survey respondents’ number one challenge, with “national economic conditions” a close second and geopolitical issues were of greater concern in this survey than in the history of our Outlook reports.

At the same time, as we mentioned last week, GDP growth for the past two quarters has been sluggish and while the employment situation looks OK at present, inflation is also on the rise. Not to raise the specter of Dr. Doom, but we may be in for a very rough year.