Mining might be going OK but it’s doing so largely by killing its support industries. if Worley Parsons shock profit warning yesterday was not enough to convince you, overnight the capex cliff presented itself in another mining bellwether, Caterpillar, which is now seeing its sales decline in every hemisphere of the earth. From the WSJ and Zero Hedge:
Caterpillar Inc.CAT -1.21% reported Wednesday that global sales of machinery by its dealers in the three months ended Oct. 31 were down 12% from a year earlier, while sales of power systems, mainly engines, fell 9%.
Both measures deteriorated from the three months ended Sept. 30, when dealer sales of machinery declined 9% and power systems were down 2%.
David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific's leading geo-politics and economics portal.
He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.
