Today, the U.S. Census Bureau published its monthly report on the changes in U.S. durable goods manufactures’ shipments, inventories and orders during February 2012 – according to this report, orders of durable goods and capital goods rose during last month compared with January’s figures.
According to the recent report, during February 2012, new orders of manufactured durable goods increased by $4.5 billion or 2.2% to $211.8 billion; Shipments of manufactured durable goods on the other hand decreased by $0.8 billion or 0.4% to $206.6 billion. Shipments of manufactured increased in the past couple of months.
Finally, the Non-defense new orders for capital goods increased by $1.2 billion or 1.5% to $81.8 billion; Inventories of manufactured durable goods increased for twenty six consecutive months – last month they rose by $1.6 billion or 0.4% to $373.7 billion.
This report provides an indicator to the progress of the U.S economy during February. Since the new orders rose along with the demand for Non-defense capital goods, this report seems to indicate signs of recovery in the U.S’s growth. Some analysts stated this growth was less than anticipated. Therefore this may have been among the factors to drag commodities prices down. I suspect this positive news makes it’s a little less likely that the Fed will vote on QE3 at the end of April seeing the economy is expanding. If there will be QE3, commodities prices are likely to rise very promptly.
Currently, major commodities are traded down: energy commodities and precious metals are falling; the Euro and other major currencies are traded slightly down against the USD; the American stock markets indexes are also falling.
Current gold price, short term futures (April 2012 delivery) is traded at $1,660.5 per t oz. a $27.2 decrease or 1.61%, as of 23:30*.
Nymex (WTI) crude oil price, short term futures (April 2012 delivery) decreased by 1.79% to $105.41 per barrel as of 23:30*.
Euros to USD exchange rate is currently traded down at 1.3316 a 0.01% decrease as of 23:30*.
(* GMT)
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