Dados EUA: Factory orders fall short in November

[notiCIas]

Factory orders fall short in November

New orders climb 0.9 percent, missing estimates, with key business spending gauge falling for second straight month.
January 4 2007: 10:17 AM EST


WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- New orders at U.S. factories rose 0.9 percent in November, slightly less than forecast, while inventories inched up slightly in a possible sign of economic slack, a government report showed on Thursday.

Analysts polled by Reuters had expected factory orders to gain 1.4 percent after October's revised 4.5 percent decline, originally reported as a 4.7 percent drop.

U.S. manufacturing is being watched closely by the Federal Reserve in its deliberations on interest rate policy, as it monitors the health of the economy to judge whether a cooling housing market has a broader-than-expected impact on growth.

Recession clouds darken 2007 outlook
Excluding transportation, factory orders fell 0.5 percent, the Commerce Department said. Non-defense capital goods orders excluding aircraft, seen as a good gauge of business spending, fell 1.1 percent from a 4.0 drop the previous month.

The last time this measure fell for two consecutive months was in February and March 2005.

Manufacturing shipments edged up 0.1 percent, matching the pace of the previous month's increase, while inventories grew by 0.2 percent.

The inventory-to-shipments ratio, a measure of how many months it would take to exhaust stores of goods, pushed up to 1.24 months' time from 1.23 in October. Economists say this measure can signal sales may not have been as strong as expected.