This is an interesting indication:
New orders for manufactured durable goods in November increased $1.6 billion or 0.7 percent to $220.9 billion, the U.S. Census Bureau announced today. This increase, up six of the last seven months, followed a 1.1 percent October increase. Excluding transportation, new orders increased 1.6 percent. Excluding defense, new orders increased 0.8 percent. Machinery, up three consecutive months, had the largest increase, $1.0 billion or 3.3 percent to $32.0 billion.
The headline looks pretty darn good! Do the internals match?
Machinery and primary metals look pretty good. The one mixed bag is found in computers and the huge bump in new orders for communications two months ago disappeared -- and shipments were down materially there.
Non-itemized durables, however, which is a fairly big category (about the same size in dollar volume as machinery) was essentially flat as it was last month.
I would call this report positive but this series is quite volatile. Nonetheless taken with the Fed regional report from yesterday that also showed an unexpected positive move there is an indication of a short-term blip upward.
The question now is whether this represents people maneuvering in front of expected negative tax changes in the new year, or whether it is an actual change in economic outlook.
For that we will have to wait until January's numbers come in.
