All "recovery watchers" are urged to look somewhere else than the just released [4]monthly Caterpillar dealer retail sales. Because while in September there was some hope that North American industrial demand may finally be picking up when retail sales on the continent posted the first two month sequential increase since 2012 even as the rest of the world was stuck deep in negative territory, that hope too was just been dashed with October North American retail sales posting the first decline of -2% since July. And unfortunately while North American sales just rejected any glimmer of a localized recovery, the rest of the world just keeps getting worse and worse, with negative sales prints across the board for every region - the first time this has happened since February 2010. The only difference is that then the trend was higher. Now, well, it isn't.
[5]
As for the rest of the CAT story: we have covered it more than enough in the past - find more here [6], here [7], here [8] and here [9]. And then there is, of course, Jim Chanos [10].