Thursday, November 12, 2009

Rail Traffic Indicator

Maybe it is because I am a nerd, but this fascinates me.


Look at the collapse in rail traffic in Q4 of 2008. Wow. But 2009 has stabilized and is showing an slightly upward trend in the second half of 2009. Why do we care about this particularly? Well, because this is a real time correlation with agricultural, mineral and industrial production in the US - output measures of economic activity for short.

So the story here is generally consistent with GDP and other measures of industrial output.

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