YESTERDATA: HOMEBUILDER SENTIMENT A BIT LESS GLOOMY, STALE FACTORY ORDERS MEET CONSENSUS<\/p>\n
Official economic data is still being released in a trickle, with stale government data taking a back seat to more current indicators from independent sources.<\/p>\n
In the latter camp, the mood among homebuilders has grown less gloomy this month.<\/p>\n
The National Association of Homebuilders’ (USNAHB=ECI) housing market index (HMI) unexpectedly gained one point to print at a still-dismal 38, indicating that builder sentiment remains sour, languishing well south of 50, the dividing line between pessimism and optimism in the sector. <\/p>\n
“We continue to see demand-side weakness as a softening labor market and stretched consumer finances are contributing to a difficult sales environment,\u201d says Robert Dietz, NAHB’s chief economist. \u201cAfter a decline for single-family housing starts in 2025, NAHB is forecasting a slight gain in 2026 as builders continue to report future sales conditions in marginally positive territory.\u201d <\/p>\n
In official data, way back in August, new orders for U.S. factory-made merchandise (USFORD=ECI) increased by 1.4% as expected, marking a solid rebound from July’s 1.3% decline. <\/p>\n
Delving below the headline, nearly all of that bounce-back can be attributable to transportation goods; excluding those items, factory orders rose by a far less impressive 0.1%.<\/p>\n
Orders for commercial and defense aircraft jumped by 21.8% and 48.4%, while the broader transportation segment rose by 7.9%.<\/p>\n
Core capital goods – which excludes aircraft and defense items and is considered a barometer of U.S. corporate capex plans – increased by 0.4%, downwardly revised from the previously-stated 0.6% gain and a marked deceleration from the prior month’s 0.7% increase.<\/p>\n
“Core orders have held up better than the depressed level of most survey indicators of capex intentions would have suggested recently,” writes Oliver Allen, senior U.S. economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics. “The slight improvement seen in recent months seems to reflect a partial easing of tariff-related uncertainty.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"YESTERDATA: HOMEBUILDER SENTIMENT A BIT LESS GLOOMY, STALE FACTORY ORDERS MEET CONSENSUS Official economic data is still being…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":264770,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[84,1294,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-270320","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-economy","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-economy","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270320","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=270320"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270320\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/264770"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=270320"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=270320"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=270320"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}