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U.S. consumer confidence improved this month after last month's 28-year low, according to the Reuters/University of Michigan’s preliminary monthly consumer sentiment index, released Friday.

Business inventories fell 0.6% in October, the largest decline in five years, the Commerce Department said Friday.

Retail sales fell 1.8% in November, the fifth consecutive month of decline, led by a continued drop in automobile and gasoline sales, the Commerce Department said Friday.

The average retail price of U.S. diesel fuel dropped for the 10th consecutive week, the Department of Energy reported, but the gap between diesel and gasoline price reached the widest spread since the agency began publishing diesel prices in 1994.

President-elect Barack Obama’s promise to sponsor the largest infrastructure-building program in more than 50 years has excited trucking officials, who also encouraged the new administration not to overlook the longer-term highway spending package due next year.

The Department of Transportation said highway deaths fell 10% for the first 10 months of 2008 and said it expects fatalities to be at an all-time low when the full year totals are calculated.

Prices paid to U.S. producers fell 2.2% in November, the Labor Department said Friday.

The price of goods imported to the United States fell 6.7% in November, the largest drop since recording began in 1988, the Labor Department said Thursday.

President-elect Barack Obama has chosen the Nobel-prize-winning head of a California research institute and a former New Jersey environmental official to fill his cabinet positions heading the Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency, Bloomberg reported Thursday.

California regulators are considering a first-in-the-nation plan that would require almost all privately owned heavy-duty trucks in the state to install particulate filters to reduce soot emissions by 85%, the San Jose Mercury News reported Thursday.