Just at the time some economists are talking about higher capital spending by business offsetting flagging consumer spending comes a report showing machine tool orders slowing at the end of 2005.
Gross new orders of machine tools for U.S. consumption totaled $245.04 million in November 2005, down 2.5% from October's $251.36 million, according to data jointly released by the American Machine Tool Distributors' Association and AMT -- The Association for Manufacturing Technology.
New orders for metal-cutting machine tools totaled $233.77 million in November, down 1.8% from October's $238.12 million. New orders for metal-forming machine tools were $11.27 million in November, down 14.9% from October's $13.24 million.
For the first 11 months of 2005, new orders for totaled $2.77 billion, 8.3% higher than 2004's $2.55 billion.
