World Growth? See CAT Sales

One of the mainstays of industrial America is Caterpillar (CAT).  They make the dump trucks, road-graders, earth-movers, and other "heavy" machinery which is absolutely necessary to build buildings and roads and extract stuff from under the earth.

So when the Professional Class Yappers tell you that "global growth is goin' on", the easy way to check their story is against CAT.

And you'll wish you hadn't.

...the company's publicly disclosed monthly retail sales have just one message for anyone who follows them: forget recession, there is a global depression going on. 

And it is not just in China as many would like to scapegoat: in June, in addition to a -19% drop in Asia Pacific (following a 30% Y/Y plunge a year ago, which in turn followed a 21% drop in 2013), US retail sales posted their first Y/Y decline since February, dropping by 5%. 

But the real depression is in Latin America, where CAT retail sales plummeted by a whopping 50%: the most in reported history, and follow an 18% drop from a year earlier....

CAT retail sales have been going down since about 2Q11 after a rise beginning 3Q09 (which followed the nastiness of sales in '08.)