German Manfuacturing Collapse: “Awful” Industrial Orders Plunge Most Since Financial Crisis
by Tyler Durden
ZeroHedge.com
Thu, 04/04/2019
One day after Germany’s leading economic institutes slashed their forecasts for 2019 growth by more than half on Thursday (and warned that the economy could slow much more if Britain quits the European Union without an agreement), Germany again confirmed just how bad the manufacturing recession at the heart of the Eurozone is, when it reported that Industrial orders fell by the biggest margin sequentially in more than two years in February, slumping 4.2%, badly missing consensus expectations of a 0.3% rebound, and worse than last monght’s -2.1% drop, highlighting the extent of the slowdown amid ongoing global trade disputes.
On an annual basis, the collapse was almost unprecedented, with the 8.2% drop matching the worst since the global financial crisis.
The drop in orders in February was marked by a slump in foreign demand, data from the Economy Ministry showed. Across sectors, orders of capital goods fell by 6.0%, compared with a decrease of 0.9% and 3.5% for intermediate and consumer goods orders, respectively.
As Goldman recaps, the February weakness was “broad-based across regions and sectors. Foreign orders declined the most (by 7.9%mom, of which -2.9% from the Euro area countries) against a decrease of 1.6% for domestic orders.”
Digging between the numbers, the IIF’s Robin Brooks noted that contrary to consensus, it wasn’t collapsing Chinese trade that was the culprit for the drop, but rather the GDP contraction in Turkey that disproportionately hit German manufacturing: while German exports to Turkey are only 1.4% of total, they were down 22% in the year to Jan. 2019.
The Rest…HERE
