New orders for US manufactured goods fell for a second straight month in September, and business spending on equipment appears to have pulled back in the third quarter.
Factory orders dropped 0.5 percent after a downwardly revised 0.8 percent decrease in August, the Commerce Department’s Census Bureau said on Monday. Economists polled by Reuters had forecast factory orders would fall 0.5 percent after a previously reported 0.2 percent decline in August.
Factory orders were unchanged from a year earlier.
The government also reported that orders for non-defense capital goods excluding aircraft, which are seen as a measure of business spending plans on equipment, increased 0.7 percent in September instead of the previously reported 0.5 percent.
Shipments of these so-called core capital goods fell 0.1 percent instead of declining 0.3 percent as reported last month. Nondefense capital goods orders dropped 4.4 percent, instead of by 4.5 percent as initially estimated.
Shipments of those goods decreased 3.4 percent rather than 3.6 percent, as initially estimated. These shipments go into the calculation of the business spending on equipment component in the gross domestic product report. That suggests a slowing in business investment in equipment in the third quarter.
