Factory Orders for November 2009 - up 1.1%

Manufacturing Sales, Inventories and New Orders is out for November 2009. This economic indicator is often called Factory orders in the press.

New Orders increased 1.1% from October 2009.

new orders, Nov.2009

The breakdown of New Orders is:

Durable Goods - 0.2%
Non-Durable Goods - 1.8%
Computers & Electronics - 4.9%

Shipments are even more news, the ratio of shipments to inventories dropped to 1.32 months of inventory to shipments.

Inventories decreased 0.3% from last month.

Overall, it's looking promising that the manufacturing sector of the economy is coming alive. With such happy talk one must look at where new orders was before the recession. The graphs below are for durable goods (items which last more than 3 years) and one can see the new orders are still nowhere near they were at the start of this recession. Overall capital goods looks a little better and also will add to GDP investment component.