The Census Bureau reported on February 27, 2017 that January durable-goods orders increased 1.8 percent to $230.4 billion. Reproducing that comparison requires the December estimate in the same release: $226.3 billion, revised. The $227.0 billion figure published a month earlier describes an earlier estimate, not the baseline Census used for January's headline. [CB 17-25 M3-1 (17)-01][CB 17-12 M3-1 (16)-12]

The January 27 advance report had put December's monthly order decline at 0.4 percent. By February 27, that decline was 0.8 percent. This is a revision to the description of December, not an additional fall during December. Nor should readers try to recover the published January percentage from rounded billion-dollar totals; the displayed levels have less precision than the underlying figures. [CB 17-25 M3-1 (17)-01][CB 17-12 M3-1 (16)-12]

A second distinction concerns what is included. January orders rose overall but fell 0.2 percent when transportation equipment was removed. The earlier December release had reported a 0.5 percent increase outside transportation. That comparison identifies what each advance release said; it does not combine them into a final, consistently revised time series. Both documents come from the same Census evidence chain. [CB 17-25 M3-1 (17)-01][CB 17-12 M3-1 (16)-12]

These are seasonally adjusted nominal dollar amounts, not quantities corrected for inflation. New orders are net of cancellations, and the orders figures exclude semiconductor manufacturing. Because the survey panel is not a probability sample, normal sampling errors and confidence intervals cannot be calculated. For a reader maintaining a spreadsheet, the practical response is to keep the release date beside each observation and replace the comparison baseline when using a newer reported growth rate. [CB 17-25 M3-1 (17)-01][CB 17-12 M3-1 (16)-12]

Source documents

  1. Advance report on durable goods, January 2017https://www.census.gov/manufacturing/m3/historical_data/pressreleases/adv/2017/jan17adv.pdf
  2. Advance report on durable goods, December 2016https://www.census.gov/manufacturing/m3/historical_data/pressreleases/adv/2016/dec16adv.pdf