The Advance Report on Manufacturers’ Shipments, Inventories and Orders released today gives us a first look at the August durable goods numbers. Here is the Bureau’s summary on new orders:

New orders for manufactured durable goods in August decreased $4.8 billion or 2.0 percent to $236.3 billion, the U.S. Census Bureau announced today. This decrease, down following two consecutive monthly increases, followed a 1.9 percent July increase. Excluding transportation, new orders decreased less than $0.1 billion, or virtually unchanged. Excluding defense, new orders decreased $2.2 billion or 1.0 percent.

Transportation equipment, also down following two consecutive monthly increases, led the decrease, $4.8 billion or 5.8 percent to $78.7 billion. Download full PDF

The latest new orders headline number at -2.0 percent was spot on the Investing.com estimate. This series is down -2.3 percent year-over-year (YoY). If we exclude transportation, “core” durable goods came in at 0.0 percent month-over-month (MoM), a tick below the Investing.com estimate of 0.1 percent. However, the core measure is down -3.9 percent YoY.

If we exclude both transportation and defense for an even more fundamental “core”, the latest number was up -1.8 percent MoM but down -4.5 percent YoY.

Core Capital Goods New Orders (nondefense capital goods used in the production of goods or services, excluding aircraft) is an important gauge of business spending, often referred to as Core Capex. It posted a -0.2 percent decline, and it is down -5.2 percent YoY.

For a look at the big picture and an understanding of the relative size of the major components, here is an area chart of Durable Goods New Orders minus Transportation and Defense with those two components stacked on top. We’ve also included a dotted line to show the relative size of Core Capex.

The next chart shows year-over-year percent change in Durable Goods. We’ve highlighted the value at recession starts and the latest value for this metric.