New orders for manufactured durable goods in October increased slightly to $216.9 billion, the U.S. Census Bureau announced today. This increase, up five of the last six months, followed a 9.2 percent September increase. Excluding transportation, new orders increased 1.5 percent. Excluding defense, new orders increased 0.1 percent.
Machinery, up two consecutive months, had the largest increase, $0.9 billion or 2.9 percent to $30.9 billion.
Meh.
Let's look at the internals and see what's in there.
Focusing on new orders, computers were down 9.3% -- but communications were up 11.4%, and had a 9.5% shipment increase as well. This follows two weak months. However, two of the three months have been net negative for both computers and comms on a shipments basis, so it's difficult to look at something that oscillates but has a net-negative trend as "good."
One good bit of news is that primary metals looks to be reaosnably stable, which is a good thing. But ex-defense new orders were only up 0.1% and both aircraft (which is extremely volatile) and vehicles (much less so) were negative. Motor vehicles have now put in a three-month negative set of figures for both shipments and orders -- and that's not good, considering that vehicles have been one of the "drivers" of so-called "economic recovery" thus far.
Non-itemized (other than the listed durables) were flat in both shipments and new orders.
What to make of this? It's a report that shows no trend, other than the clear loss of momentum in vehicle sales and orders.
On-balance I read this as showing no trend externally and unlike the media pumpers who were immediately grasping at straws in the communications figures, the typical volatility in that subset of the series and the 2-of-3 month decrease says that you should not be sanguine in that regard. Arguably the worst indicator on a forward basis, which tends to filter into employment trends (virtually every employee these days needs a computer of some sort), is the computer equipment number annualized, which is off ~10% for both shipments and orders.
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I love how good reports are turned into bad reports. I know you have a deep emotional investment in doomsday, but reality refuses to comport with your fantasy.
Mangoelvis
Posts: 1727
Incept: 2009-07-11
Las Vegas, NV
Anecdotal regarding autos. A buddy of mine just bought a new Honda Civic and was able to get 0.9% financing. This is despite him filing BK about 2 yrs ago. Granted he did pay off an auto in full about 10 yrs ago but other than that his credit is bad.
Oh, and was able to get 2 dealers competing for his business during negotiations. Seems to me autos might be the new subprime.
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Evolutionarily speaking, sloths must taste terrible.
Reality is Bernake is dumping $80-$85 BILLION into the market each month - there's your "recovery"... where do these people come from? Daily Kos? Huff Po? this is BASIC stuff - maybe this is Million Dollar Bonus from ZH:-)
Is that what they're calling The Crazy Train these days?
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==== If it's true that "assault weapons" are "weapons of war" and don't belong on the streets of America, why do the police need them? Who are the police at war with?
Blackswan
Posts: 5563
Incept: 2007-11-06
Just outside of Philly
Here is a take on durable goods..from ZH.
While the just released Durable Goods orders report for October came in modestly better than expected (which many thought would be a decline due to Hurricane Sandy), the primary driver of this continues to be record durable good inventory accumulation. Excluding the noise, and focusing only on real, non-noisy economic strength metrics such as New Capital Goods Orders (technically defined as the year over year change in Non-Defense Capital Goods Excluding Aircraft), a very different and far uglier picture emerges. In fact, the October Y/Y Plunge of -8.1% in this major indicator was the biggest drop since 2009.
Bagbalm
Posts: 4255
Incept: 2009-03-19
Just North of Detroit
The thing that*****es me off about Billreilly is that I probably paid for his little post with my taxes. He dings Karl and praises his gloriousness Obama strictly by personality - Karl bad / Obama good. No numbers, no analysis. How the hell many government workers are either hired to pump this stuff out as their primary job, or set to doing it instead of whatever they are really supposed to be doing? Not SEC workers of course...We know they are very, very busy supporting the porn industry.
Medicdan
Posts: 8017
Incept: 2010-02-11
Scottsdale, AZ
BillReilly, is just attempting to hijack the thread and make it about his savior. Don't feed into it. Most people like him couldn't pass an econ 101 class.
Trades50
Posts: 4215
Incept: 2007-10-30
Land of Tax and Spend
Bagbalm, I'm running into so many Obama worshipers. Their supporting Bernanke's printing us into a recovery.
Using the game of financialization to produce a recovery. We used housing and created a bubble. How did that work out? We have the 20 somethings in hock for $100K loans. And now we revert back to low quality loans.
I can tell you that I feel squeezed with prices and no increases in income.
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When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. When the government fears the people, there is liberty. - Thomas Jefferson
The thing that*****es me off about Billreilly is that I probably paid for his little post with my taxes. He dings Karl and praises his gloriousness Obama strictly by personality - Karl bad / Obama good. No numbers, no analysis.
The reason I've started calling this The cRaZy tRaIn is because we just validated $3.50 a gallon gasoline as the New Normal earlier in the month.
Nobody will get voted out because of that, so it's All Good. Next up, the EPA (Committee of Public Safety) is totally unleashed. Say goodbye to "cheap" electricity - 15 cents/KwH is going to be in the rear-view mirror.
Look for the Watermelons (Greenies - green on the outside, red on the inside) to pull a Lucy Van Pelt with natural gas (as is their wont) with wall-to-wall Fracking Is Bad memes blanketing the US Department of Media.
The peasants are going to take this as rhino horn dry up the pooper - because they're going to be paying the new higher energy costs AND higher taxes to pay for energy consumption for police & military, and raises for the .gov types so's they can keep ahead of the cost of living.
But there'll be No Soup for the peasantry.
cRaZy tRaIn FTW!!!
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==== If it's true that "assault weapons" are "weapons of war" and don't belong on the streets of America, why do the police need them? Who are the police at war with?
They are bulling Facebook. Think they are responsible for the rebound in communications? Haha!
The British idiot, Simon Hobbs, was bulling the fact they might have sold $1.5 billion on cyber Monday. I'm shocked. What would the boost on Monday be? They all have webpages to sell stuff now. Thus, $5 per capita went online. How does that justify the 12 figure values of some of these outfits?
All this is being financed by money loaned to people that can never pay it back. That includes the various governments around the world. Some austerity in Greece. What are they putting in? Seems I read over $40 billion US at current exchange. The entire annual Texas budget is about $40 billion and I bet the GDP of Texas dwarfs Greece. Greece will get down to 120% of GDP when they default.
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The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.---John Kenneth Galbraith
