by Jeffrey P. Snider
Alhambra Partners
There wasn’t anything new or surprising in the advance durable goods report. Shipments (ex transportation) were flat and orders were up 1% year-over-year (NSA). Capital goods (non-defense, ex aircraft) shipments fell 3.4%, the tenth straight month of contraction, while new orders were down again (2.6%) for the sixteenth time out of the past nineteen months. The slump only continues.
[…] With last month’s benchmark revisions, however, we have a much better view of the overall slowdown. It increasingly appears as if there were not separate slumps divided by a late 2013/early 2014 rebound but rather a single, unbroken mess. The removal of the upward resumption in especially 2014 leaves the trajectory mostly flat, with minor deviations around that baseline.