Durable Goods, Consumer Confidence Reports Spark Recovery Talk

As the Federal Reserve began its two-day meeting Tuesday, reports of a five-month high in consumer confidence and a 2% jump in durable goods orders offered some of the strongest evidence yet that the U.S. economy is improving.

Since trucking is extremely sensitive to the state of the economy, an upturn could mean improving fortunes for trucking companies.

Both of these reports have fueled additional speculation that the Fed will refrain from lowering interest rates for the 12th time in 13 months when its meeting concludes Wednesday afternoon, the Associated Press said. And that was after Chairman Alan Greenspan told Congress last week that he was already seeing signs of a recovery,

The increase in durable goods to $176.4 billion reported by the Commerce Department, which followed a revised 6% decline in November, was the second increase in the last three months and is a sign that factories are starting to come out of an 18 month slump, analysts told Bloomberg. Analysts were predicting only a 1.4% increase, Bloomberg said.

Excluding volatile transportation orders, durable goods rose 1.4% in December after a revised 0.7% increase the prior month. This matched analysts' forecasts, Bloomberg said.

or all of 2001, orders for durable goods fell 13.2%, compared with a 6.7% increase in 2000, Commerce officials said. The decline last year was the first and largest since the department started keeping comparable records in 1992.

Meanwhile, the New York-based Conference Board consumer confidence index rose to 97.3 after rising to 94.6 in December. Analysts were expecting the index to rise only to 96, Bloomberg noted.

The Board also said that the expectations index, which measures the outlook for six months from now, soared to a one-year high.

The Conference Board is a nonprofit research and business group, with more than 2,700 corporate and other members around the world.

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