The Rise & Fall, or Just the Fall of Factory Orders
Factory orders for the month of December fell as you would expect for the current economy. But the results were even worse than weak estimates out there. They fell 3.9% rather than the 3.4% decline economists expected. On an ex-transportation…
This post may contain links from our sponsors and affiliates, and Flywheel Publishing may receive compensation for actions taken through them.
Factory orders for the month of December fell as you would expect for the current economy. But the results were even worse than weak estimates out there. They fell 3.9% rather than the 3.4% decline economists expected. On an ex-transportation basis, the drop-off was 4.4% and the durable goods figures were revised to a decline of 3.0% from fall of 2.6%.
This marks the fifth consecutive month of declines. But there is something interesting here. Because the front months in 2008 remained higher, the full year 2008 factory orders showed a gain of 0.4%. That means that we are likely to see negative comparisons for a few more months before these even start to look normalized. Don’t be too surprised if these continue to look bad on a year-over-year basis through summer.
Jon C. Ogg
February 5, 2009
Contact [email protected] for any questions or corrections.
Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.
McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.
His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.
A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.
TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.
McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.
