The headline number will be choppy for a few months because of dynamics from the end of 2022 and beginning of 2023. Core capital goods will be the series providing the most information for the time being. It bounced off 0% growth and is back closer to 2%, which is welcome news. Disclaimer: This information is presented for informational [...]
Current conditions and activity were reported a bit better than October although activity still remains in negative territory. New orders ticked down in Nov versus Oct. The general trend is still positive, but we don't want to see further weakness below the quick and dirty trend line. Disclaimer: This information is presented for informational purposes only and does not [...]
New orders for Durable Goods looks good on the surface, up 4.7% just from last month and 7.8% from a year ago. The headline number showed an increase of $13.215B. Non-defense aircraft orders were up $15.5B, so the aggregate of everything else was down on the month. New Orders for Sep. Nondefense Capital Goods ex-Aircraft is a good proxy [...]
Well, that was a mess. The Richmond Fed’s Manufacturing Survey was at first released before being taken back. Initially reported as a plunge in the headline number, it was quickly scrapped once the statisticians remembered they had just discontinued their average workweek component – but had kept a zero in its place when tallying the overall PMI.With it, the PMI [...]
It’s an ominous though hardly surprising development. This has been shocking for those involved. Many if not most shipping companies had convinced themselves that once Shanghai and China’s vast harbor facilities were opened back up there’d be at least a mini-boom, a surge in activity for the world (America) to make up for lost time. Container rates were widely anticipated [...]
By no means are any of these PMI numbers terrible. In the vacuum of mainstream Economics' ceteris paribus fantasy, these might all be mildly pleasing. There is no such thing, however, and despite where they now are these are verging closer to comparisons which could be, several already have been, concerning. As such, the direction and trend being established as [...]
The script has been flipped, so to speak, this time around. Whenever we’d go through one of those regular, alternating downturns worldwide, like the one which began right from the start of 2018, it was services which held up the increasingly troubled manufacturing sector. The variation for the swing, from globally synchronized growth to globally synchronized downturn, was mostly contained [...]
The economy was in danger of running hot, too hot they all said. In order to stay ahead of such inflation potential, as central bankers saw it, first it would be necessary to wind down quantitative easing. Taper then terminate. After that, rate hikes.Hawks buzzing around everywhere.But Mario Draghi’s ECB had a problem. The inflationary pressures were there, he reasoned, [...]
There is no “decoupling”, at least there hasn’t been yet. Why would this time end up any different? The history of the term has itself changed over time, but by doing so has offered further proof this is a fact of global economic life in the post-August 2007 eurodollar era. It always goes like this: globally synchronized reflation (not growth); [...]
New orders, new orders, new orders. That’s the substance of the inventory cycle. A lot more of them, the upswing in it can remain intact keeping the global manufacturing economy humming along. Should they start to scale back and then, maybe at some point, decline, this unusual supply-constraint trend transitions toward a more historical inventory cycle on the downturn. As [...]
Stay In Touch