Business investment remained encouragingly strong with orders for non-defense capital goods—excluding aircraft—climbing by 1.4% in December after increasing by 3.1% in November. Why “excluding aircraft”? Because there seems to be something wrong with the seasonal adjustments to aircraft orders.
Real estate prices in China are rising at an unsustainable rate but the bursting of a real estate bubble in China would claim very different victims and to very different degrees than the bursting of the U.S. bubble did.
That’s a much longer delay than Wall Street now anticipates. Estimates there for when the Federal Reserve will start to raise rates range from late this year to the first half of 2011.
