Cass Freight Index Rises 3.7% in April
The Cass Freight Index of shipments rose 3.7% in April over the previous month and 4% year-over-year. Expenditures spiked 6% in April and 3.1% over the prior month. Shipments are up 12% from the baseline period of January 1990; expenditures have risen 142%.
The index, which uses information from bill payments through a St. Louis bank, is based mainly on trucking data but also includes air, rail and barge freight.
The shipments and expenditures indexes have been positive for four consecutive months. “Throughout the U.S. economy, there is a growing number of data points suggesting the economy continues to get slightly better,” Donald Broughton wrote in his report for Avondale Partners. “Some data points are simply less bad, but an increasing number of them are better, and even a few are becoming outright strong.”
Broughton wrote that the 4% year-over-year jump in April in the Cass Shipments Index is another data point suggesting that the first positive indication in October may have been a trend change.
“In fact,” Broughton wrote, “it now looks as if the October Cass Shipments Index, which broke a string of 20 months in negative territory, was one of the first indications that a recovery in freight — or at least a change in trend — had begun.”
Cass points to the positive news as signaling a “turn in trend.” The total amount spent on freight turned positive for the first time in 22 months in January of this year, yet against a weak comparison. “Not since 2011, when the economy was still climbing out of the recession, had this index been so low,” Broughton wrote.
