If yesterday the BEA provided the sugar high for Q3, with a GDP number that will be soon revised lower, then today's economic barage has so far been a disaster, with both Initial Claims, Personal Income and Spending, and now core Durable goods and capital goods shipments and orders missing across the board.
While the headline Durable Goods number printed up 0.4%...
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... this was entirely thanks to the usual volatile filler: transports. Excluding these, the Durable Goods ex-transports number dropped by a whopping -0.9%, far below the 0.5% increase expected, and the biggest drop since the December -1.8% tumble which was blamed on the Polar Vortex. It is unclear what the October tumble will be blamed on: the Ebola scare? The Bullard Bottom?
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Worse, the long-awaited CapEx recovery will not be materializing one more month, after Non-defense Capital Goods orders ex-aircraft declined for a second month in a row, dropping -1.3%, the same drop as the previous month, suggesting that - as everyone knows by now - companies will be far more focused on spending on buybacks than on capex for quarters to come. In fact, the number was bad, at only $71.2 billion in orders, this was the lowest print since May.
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