While there was continued expansion, production growth fell from Q4 2009's +6.6% rate and Q3 2009's +6.4% growth. Still, overall industrial production kept growing in February.
But... diving into a breakdown of different products by market shows that some U.S. industries have already experienced sharp reversals of fortune.
As shown below, U.S. industrial production contracted sharply in February (orange bars) for Home Electronics, Appliances & Furniture, Paper Products, and Industrial Business Equipment. This came after strong growth in Q4 (blue bars). Thus for some the recovery already feels like it's over.
This tells me that even after billions of dollars of debt have been created and injected into this economy the best we could do is rebuild inventories. The items that are selling are those which we have to have just to get by. The items that would indicate some sort of future surge in hiring such as business supplies and business equipment are falling. Further, it looks as though the big ticket items such as appliances and home electronics are falling, too. My guess is that this is because there is no longer much in the way of credit available to the consumer to buy these things and they wouldn't buy even if there was. Too many are unemployed and most that still have jobs are not that certain of their future.
So how can an economy that's GDP was 70% consumer driven be recovering with these sorts of realities?
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