Durable goods orders down 4% to start the year
Ed Morrissy at Hot Air always watches federal government statistics and economic reports, providing a good, easy to understand explanation. Today, the U.S. Census Bureau announced orders for manufactured durable goods in January declined 4 percent.
The first hint of this came in the 2011Q4 GDP report. While the topline number of 2.8% looked mediocre but not horrid, the figure for growth in real final sales of domestic product — which measures end sales and not inventory adjustments — registered only at 0.8%, barely above recession level. I noted that this was a red flag for the next quarter and a sign of dropping demand, but today’s report on durable goods was much worse than that indicated.
Read his full post, where he also notes inventories manufactured durable goods continue to rise.
7 Comments
The website's content and articles were migrated to a new framework in October 2023. You may see [shortcodes in brackets] that do not make any sense. Please ignore that stuff. We may fix it at some point, but we do not have the time now.
You'll also note comments migrated over may have misplaced question marks and missing spaces. All comments were migrated, but trackbacks may not show.
The site is not broken.
It’s important to keep extending unemployment benefits and the Social Security underfunding so people will buy more durable goods. This sorry report can easily be blamed on the do-nothing Republican House of Representatives.
Lemme guess: it was “unexpected”, right?? Will the inevitable downward revision be soon to follow?
these numbers are undoubtedly cooked, too–from what we’ve seen, it can’t be that good.
Ed Morissey, purveyor of doom and gloom.
What business doesn’t scramble to purchase all it’s equipment before 12/31 for the year’s write offs…who would be so stupid to wait until Jan.?
you might be surprised to learn that many businesses operate on a fiscal year, not calendar, so things are balanced differently. ? more purchase with volume incentives and to avoid price increases. ? the calendar first quarter can be a dead time in certain industries,? so there are great deals to be had.? also,? equipment is generally depreciated, not written off–a more protracted process that isn’t necessarily a benefit to the business.
He can only report the doom and gloom that ? creates.? Wait until “Taxaggedon” in January 2013!
While it is for January, I wouldn’t make too much of it. If this is the start of a trend, Feb., March, and in to early summer, this bodes very poorly for the country and ?bama.