U.S. Leading Indicators Rise for Fourth Straight Month

Adding to mounting evidence that the recession is ending, the U.S. index of leading economic indicators rose in January for the fourth consecutive month, while first-time unemployment claims last week rose slightly.

Trucking is sensitive to fluctuations in the economy, and an upturn can mean an increase in demand for trucking services.

The LEI, a measure of the economy’s performance over the next three to six months, rose 0.6% last month, the private Conference Board said. This follows a 1.3% jump in December.

Labor said that initial jobless claims rose 10,000 last week to 383,000, suggesting that job cuts had slowed, but that hirings were still lagging, analysts told Bloomberg.

The LEI report, released by the Conference Board on the same day the Labor Department said that the number of U.S. workers applying for unemployment benefits for the first time jumped by 10,000, but remained below 400,000 for the seventh straight week. Both are tentative signs of economic recovery.

The string of four straight increases in the LEI is the longest since a stretch ending in January 2000, during the record economic expansion of the late 1990s, Bloomberg reported.

The recession officially began in March, but deepened after the terrorist attacks in September. Bloomberg said that a string of positive indicators, including the LEI, have made many analysts optimistic about a recovery.

The four-week moving average for jobless claims, a figure designed to remove volatility from the week-to-week jobless data, rose for the first time in six weeks – climbing to 381,750 from 376,000 in the week before, Labor said.

The number of weekly claims are down from an average of 456,000 during the fourth quarter of 2001.

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