TRUCKING: THE ECONOMY IS STILL EXPANDING
Bloomberg had a nice report today on the state of the trucking industry in the USA. They note the following:
- Truck freight loadings in April were up 3% year over year and 1.4% month over month.
- Actual tonnage was up 2.8% year over year and 2.6% month over month.
- BB&T trucking analyst Tom Albrecht notes 29 consecutive months of growth.
- Tonnage is seasonally steady.
- MOST IMPORTANTLY – we have never had a recession when tonnage is expanding.
This is all pretty consistent with the rail data we’ve been seeing. It’s obviously not going gangbusters, but none of this is consistent with a recession.
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Cullen Roche
Mr. Roche is the Founder of Orcam Financial Group, LLC. Orcam is a financial services firm offering research, private advisory, institutional consulting and educational services.
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5 Comments
quite consistent with intermodals. Not nearly consistent with recent retail sales trend. So, what is it? Increased exports (to Spain and Greece, of cause)? Or inventories build-up? I think it is the later. And it counts toward GDP, so “no recession”, at least, based on this metrics.
Anyone know if there is a fairly public source where Bloomberg accumulates these data from? Curious as to if it would be realtively easy to track on my own like rail data is.
http://blog.yardeni.com/2012/06/flow-of-funds.html
Thanks El V – per your link “There has been some modest deleveraging happening in the household sector, where outstanding debt peaked at a record $13.8 trillion during Q1-2008. It is now down to $12.9 trillion”
I had assumed household mortgage debt had dropped much further. This seems like a drop in the bucket. How could the balance sheet recession be on the mend without more significant cut backs than that?
Well get ready for a depression while tonnage is expanding………….