That's the what etailer Jet.com could fetch in an acquisition, as rumors swirled this week that Walmart was in talks about buying the Amazon on-line rival. Jet, barely a year old, has sought to underprice Amazon with a vast marketplace that would require billions of dollars in funding and a plan to rely more on suppliers for fulfillment than warehouse inventory, similar to China's Alibaba and Amazon's own marketplace service. Jet has already raised some $500 million in investment. Buying Jet.com would push Walmart's ecommerce efforts in a new direction as it seeks to grow beyond its brick-and-mortar storefronts with speedy home delivery from a network of big, new suburban warehouses. The company would gain Jet's sophisticated pricing software and warehouses tailored for on-line delivery from such a move. Will a deal happen? "Walmart could certainly use some energy" around its on-line efforts, said Bryan Gildenberg, an analyst at Kantar Retail. "I'm struggling with the math of why you would pay this much money for this [business] model at this particular time."

That was the decline in profits in Q2 at leading public US truckload carriers, according the usual quarterly analysis performed by SCDigest. Those declines were due to a freight market almost all the carriers characterized as "soft" in the quarter. For example, Werner noted that "Second quarter 2016 freight demand was significantly softer than freight demand in the second quarters of the prior two years." Similarly, Heartland Express commented that "Throughout the first half of 2016 we continued to experience downward pressure on freight rates due to the softness in freight volumes resulting from the available capacity in the industry." That led to a rise in average operating ratios across the six carriers we follow, rising to 88.7% from 85.1% in Q2 2015. Swift said it has responded to the slump by reducing its average operational truck count by 244 trucks in Q2 versus 2015.