The Washington Post told readers that the Commerce Department's data on durable good orders for March was better than expected. The consensus forecast was a decline of 1.5 percent, while the actual decline was just so 0.8 percent, so it looks like they may have a case. The only problem is that the increase reported for February was revised down from 3.4 percent to 2.1 percent. The net effect of the downward revision and the reported growth number is to leave March's figure for durable good orders 0.6 percent below what had been expected.
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