Usually, the sign that something is not going well over at FedEx is a notification to the effect that your package is stuck somewhere in the bowels of its hub in Memphis. But this week the global economy got a slightly more worrisome notification from FedEx: awful guidance.

Yes, FedEx’s quarterly report is every fear that could be realized during the second-quarter earnings season rolled into one.

“We have a referendum on global supply chains every single day,” FedEx president and CEO Rajesh Subramaniam said, which is obviously not an ideal operating environment, to say the least.

The stock, which has a reputation as something of an economic bellwether given its connections to global trade and consumer demand, is trading at its lowest level relative to the S&P 500 since 2001, when the US was in recession after the dot-com bubble burst.

Its capex budget for the 12 months ending May 2026 came in about half a billion below expectations, at $4.5 billion. One firm’s capex is another firm’s profits.

It’s dangerous to extrapolate from any one company’s results, and FedEx’s underperformance includes company-specific issues and is certainly not a pure signal of impending US economic doom. But its C-Suite is far from the only one that continues to fret about the potential impact of levies on US imports and retaliatory measures from other countries: the share of firms that cited trade or tariffs as their most pressing concern picked up from Q1 to Q2.

The Takeaway

The good news is that FedEx, a decidedly un-AI company, is not fully representative of the market-cap-weighted S&P 500, which is dominated by megacap tech firms. The bad news is that sufficiently negative macroeconomic dynamics come for every firm. The OK news is that it’s not clear FedEx is an especially potent macro bellwether, so who knows.

Eh, it could be worse. For instance, your package could be stuck in Tennessee.