Uh, Where’s My Recovery? (Durable Goods)

Oh, the Census finally admitted to their revision?

New orders for manufactured durable goods in December increased $0.5 billion or 0.3 percent to $167.9 billion, the U.S. Census Bureau announced today. This increase followed two consecutive monthly decreases including a 0.4 percent November decrease. Excluding transportation, new orders increased 0.9 percent. Excluding defense, new orders increased 0.3 percent.

Remember, November was reported as an increase last month.  Remember, this was part of the ramp job in the market at the end of December.  REMEMBER?

I’ll tell you what I don’t like though: 15.9% year over year declines in shipments, and 20.2% decline in new orders.

And it’s no better ex-transports and ex-defense – excluding defense it’s 17.8% and 21.4% and ex-transports it was 16.4% and 17.7% respectively (shipments and orders), all declines.

Looking down the sheet I see exactly one column that has positive year/over/year numbers in it – defense, up 5.3% (orders) and 21.0% (!!!) for shipments, respectively.

Unfilled orders and total inventories were down hard as well with everything but computers down double-digits.  Unfilled orders for computers were up 8.8% y/o/y while communications eeked out an 0.5% gain.

Note that communications equipment is a coincident indicator of hiring in high-tech and other "good paying" jobs, since new hires typically require new communications gear such as cell phones.

There’s not a lot to see here folks, other than the fact that we’ve still got a very weak "recovery."  There were indications of improved shipments and orders in the internals of the report, particularly in primary metals and machinery – both good signs.  And semiconductor shipments were up huge, but with this being the month into Christmas, that’s not a surprise (what ‘ya think goes into all the "stuff" you buy?)

But the rest of the report was lukewarm at best, and the y/o/y numbers are pretty horrid.  I’m particularly non-plussed with these given that by the time we got to December of last year we were at what everyone called "the bottom" from an economic perspective – and yet we’re putting up numbers below that point – still.

Wake me up when we see annual comparisons flatten out. 

That’s an actual bottom.