Besides the trouble
with ‘Uncle’ Silvio Berlusconi of Italy, there are more unhappy thoughts that are
currently haunting Bundeskanzlerin Angela Merkel of Germany at night.
In my last SMS
from Ernst (19), I already reported on the Germany unemployment that
had been rising by 10,000 jobs in September, where experts expected a drop in
unemployment by the same amount.
But there is more:
today the German Ministry of Economic Affairs (Bundesministerium für Wirtschaft
und Technologie) presented its industrial production data. Here are the pertinent snips, translated from German to English
by me.
Development of the production in the manufacturing
industry in September 2011
In September, the production in the German manufacturing
industry dropped by 2.7%, according to the provisional data that has been
seasonally adjusted. Revised data on August showed that the production dropped
by 0.4% in that month.Again the data for September could be overstated as a
consequence of holidays.
Industrial production dropped by 3.0%; above the average
of the total index. Especially the production of Materials & Supplies (-2.8%)
and Capital goods(-4.7%) added to this shift. The production of Consumption
goods rose by 1.1%. In the building and construction industry, production
dropped by 0.8%.
Year on year, the total average production for August
and September rose by 6.7%: 8.0% for Manufacturing and 4.4% for Building and Construction.
Although production in Q3 as a whole rose substantially,
there have been a weakening during the quarter itself. This is caused by the
late summer holiday of this year that had a negative influence on the order
amount in Q3. The production in Q4 will presumably develop moderately, when
looking at the current amount of orders in the industry.
 |
| Industrial production in Germany for August - September 2011 (source: www.bmwi.de) Click to enlarge |
I don´t want to
create a false sense of urgency and it might be that industrial growth was indeed
negatively influenced by the late common holidays in Germany. But the negative unemployment
figures and the lower industrial production might also point out that not everything
is hunky dory anymore in Germany.
So please prepare
for worse than expected figures from Germany in the coming months.
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