The overall US economy remains weak, though with some modest signs of recovery, even as some sectors are strong (e.g., consumer packaged goods).

So it should be much the same with the US freight transportation, which moves generally in lock step with economic growth.

The folks at Cass Information Sytems, which pays tens of billions of dollars in freight bills for shippers, leverages that data to publish a monthly series of metrics to help gauge the health of the freight sector.

Below is the summary chart for the just released report for July:

Summary Cass Freight Metrics for July, 2020

 As can be seen, the bad news is the Cass Shipment Index is down 13.1% year-over-year - but up a decent 4.8% versus June.

Expenditures were down even more versus 2019, at 14.3%, implying rates are down.

And sure enough, the Cass Linehaul Index, which measures US truckload rates, was down 5.7% versus July 2019, and barely budged versus June despite the increase in shipment volumes.

Internodal pricing is not seeing any recovery, down 18.3% year-over-year.

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