WASHINGTON – New orders for durable goods last month rose 2.5 percent to $206.9 billion, after falling 9.3 percent in January, the U.S. Commerce Department’s Census Bureau announced today. The increase was the third in four months, but lagged the 3.4-percent median forecast of economists surveyed by Bloomberg News.
Excluding defense, new orders rose 2.5 percent. Excluding transportation, however, new orders fell for the second month, slipping 0.1 percent after falling 4.0 percent in January; analysts had anticipated a rise last month of 1.8 percent.
“This raises a major warning flag for the economy,” Douglas Porter, deputy chief economist at BMO Capital Markets in Toronto, told Bloomberg. Added David Resler, chief economist at Nomura Securities International Inc. in New York: “The ‘possibility’ of recession by year-end looks somewhat less remote than when Mr. Greenspan first asserted such risk a month ago.”
Shipments of manufactured durable goods fell for a second month, dipping 0.8 percent to $207.3 billion after falling 1.5 percent in January.
Unfilled orders rose 0.9 percent to $702.0 billion, the highest level since statistics were revised in 1992, after rising 0.2 percent in January.
Among capital goods, non-defense orders rose 9.5 percent to $70.7 billion while defense orders rose 3.5 percent to $8.4 billion.
Additional information is available at www.census.gov.
