The Manufacturers’ Shipments, Inventories and Orders for April 2010 was released today. This report is commonly referred to as Factory Orders in the press and refers to domestic manufactured goods.

The breakdown in change from last month:

• New orders: +1.2%
• Durable: +2.8%
• Non-Durable: +0.1%
• Shipments: +0.6%
• Unfilled orders: +0.4%
• Inventories: +0.5%

Last month's report must have had significant revisions for the numbers quoted in this months report for last month do not match.

Excluding transportation, new orders decreased -0.5%. Transportation new orders had a 15.8% increase with volatile aircraft up 228.1%. Computers increased 8.5% as did industrial machinery, dropped -24.3%. Below is a graph of just durable goods new orders:

New orders are still not up to pre-recession levels.

Below is the capital goods new orders graph, removing defense and aircraft. Both are considered volatile and not the true core of manufacturing economic growth. Non-Defense Capital goods excluding aircraft dropped -2.6%.

The Durable goods report for April 2010 is here for comparison's sake.