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U.S. consumer confidence improved this month, according to the Reuters/University of Michigan’s preliminary monthly consumer sentiment index released Tuesday.

Manufacturing levels in the Philadelphia region contracted in January, the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia said Thursday. It was the 13th month of contraction in the last 14 months.

Transport Topics Online will be closed Monday, Jan. 19, for Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and Tuesday, Jan. 20, due to the presidential inauguration. Please check back on Wednesday, Jan. 21, for the latest trucking and freight transportation news.

Anything Trucker, an Internet retailer of truck and trailer accessories, said Jan. 5 it had launched the Freight Auction Network for less-than-truckload carriers.

A California legislator has introduced a bill to put a moratorium on digital advertising displays on highways until studies determine whether the billboards are safe.

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator-designate Lisa Jackson said she was “open to discussion” of a carbon tax to limit greenhouse gas emissions and would immediately begin a review of the Bush administration’s denial of California’s request to regulate those emissions from automobiles.

Business inventories fell 0.7% in November, the third consecutive month of decline, the Commerce Department said Wednesday.

Prices paid to U.S. producers fell 1.9% in December, the Labor Department said Thursday.

If you wanted to shore up a beleaguered industry, would you do it by creating a new threat? Of course not, but that’s exactly what some U.S. policymakers seem ready to do to the already devastated U.S. trucking industry.