It’s been another noisy month for data on shipments and new orders of durable goods — things that don’t need to be replaced for at least three years, like computers or airplanes.

“We had this extraordinary circumstance of an airplane having its door ripped off in mid-air,” said John Diamond, director of the Center for Public Finance at Rice University.

That skewed overall durable goods data, Diamond said. New orders for manufactured durable goods decreased 6% in January from the previous month, according to new Commerce Department data; new orders for nondefense aircrafts were down nearly 60%.

So if you take away aircrafts and look at, say, capital assets, “not just shipments of goods, but actually what are they investing in to produce goods in the future,” Diamond said, “capital goods are up, new orders are up 0.1%.”

“On balance, it’s a rather tepid report, but it’s by no means anywhere near as awful as the headline number makes it look,” said Mike Montgomery with S&P Global Market Intelligence, who went over the numbers.

“Electrical equipment, small plus. Motor vehicles, a drop, but they’ve been running exceptionally strong late in 2023. So that’s not overwhelmingly surprising,” said Montgomery.

A standout category was computers. New orders in January were up almost 6%.

“From a year ago, orders for computers and related products are very strong,” said Kathy Bostjancic, chief economist at Nationwide. 

Compare that with, say, machinery, which includes things like “construction machinery, oil field and gas machinery, metal working machinery, turbine generators,” said Bostjancic — orders year on year have been flat.

“You can see kind of like the tales of two economies here, even within the more industrial business side, that companies are hesitant to expand investment in machinery,” she said.

But they’re still investing in computers to keep up with the latest technology.