So much for ending the year on a positive economic tone: today's November durable goods number, while better than expected on a headline basis including volatile transportation data coming at 3.8% on expectations of 2.2%, was a big disappointment when looking at the core economic indicators such as Durables ex-transportation and non-defense capital goods orders ex-transportation, both of which missed, 0.3 vs 0.4% in the former case, and a whopping 11st devs for the latter: at -1.2% on expectations of 1.0% (Joe LaVorgna was +1.2%... of course), the worst since January 2011. Simply said the trend of downward GDP revisions is now coming to Q4 GDP which will likely see the consensus dip below 3.0%. While we are at it, why not stuff channels a little more: "Inventories of manufactured durable goods in November, up twenty three consecutive months, increased $2.0 billion or 0.6 percent to $368.8 billion. This was at the highest level since the series was first published on a NAICS basis and followed a 0.4 percent October increase. Transportation equipment, also up twenty three consecutive months, had the largest increase, $1.0 billion or 0.9 percent to $114.3 billion." And in other news, both consumer income (0.1%, exp 0.2%) and spending (0.1%, exp 0.3%) missed, pushing the savings rate lower again from an upward revised 3.6% in October to 3.5% in November. The reason consumers had to rely on their savings? "Private wage and salary disbursements decreased $7.1 billion in November, in contrast to an increase of $37.2 billion in October." And yet, "Government wage and salary disbursements increased $0.1 billion in November, the same increase as in October." But that's ok - for a slow motion economic trainwreck there is Obama and fudged labor data from the BLS; for everything else's there's Mastercard and soon to be unlimited lines of credit for everyone drawn straight from the Discount Window.
and the ever impressive Bloomberg estimates screen now updated for our standard-deviation-based analysis of analyst uselessness...
Chart: Bloomberg