The Capex Boom Is Real. Now It’s Time To Make It In America
By Peter Navarro | RealClearMarkets | July 27, 2026
The monthly durable goods report is one of Washington’s easiest economic releases to misread.
The headline for June was decidedly unimpressive. New orders for durable goods rose just 0.3%, well below market expectations. That will inevitably generate another round of stories suggesting American manufacturing may be running out of gas.
Look beneath the hood, however, and a very different economic picture emerges.
Excluding the volatile transportation sector, orders rose 0.6%. More importantly, orders for nondefense capital goods excluding aircraft—the government’s best monthly proxy for business investment in equipment—rose a solid 0.9%.
Shipments of these core capital goods surged an even stronger 1.9%. Through the first half of the year, core capital-goods orders are running 9.3% above the same period in 2025, with shipments up 7.5%.
These are not primarily households buying refrigerators or washing machines. They are businesses purchasing the machinery, computers, electrical systems, and productive equipment needed to expand.
Computers and electronic-product orders rose 3.1% in June. Electrical-equipment orders increased 0.9%, while primary-metals orders advanced 1.1%. The artificial-intelligence buildout is clearly an important part of this surge, but the strength extends beyond AI into vehicles, metals, power equipment, and other components of the industrial economy.
No single monthly report proves an American manufacturing renaissance. Yet these numbers are consistent with an economy shifting away from government-directed consumption and toward private capital formation.