Despite concerns about rising costs and a lack of qualified workers, purchasing and manufacturing executives at mid-sized U.S. industrial manufacturing companies remain optimistic about revenues and employment for the balance of 2014 and going forward.
If there's one story that's been beaten to death by the media in search of feel-good news from what’s been a pretty tepid economic recovery, it's that of the supposed manufacturing renaissance in the U.S.
For many companies, 2015 is looking rosy. The overall economy is finally accelerating out of the worst recession since the 1930s, helped in no small part by construction as the Construction Backlog Indicator (published by Associated Builders and Contractors) reached an all-time high in June.
If one had to choose a single word to describe the M&A market in 2013, it would be disappointing, and indeed many market participants have used this very term. But the exasperated deal makers have had little time to cry in their beer - they've been too busy. The M&A market took off like a rocket in 2014, fueled by the return of the megadeal (transactions with a value of more than $10bn), which has been in hibernation for the last several years. The momentum of the first quarter carried into the second, setting up 2014 as a potential bellwether for the market's longer-term evolution.
Builder confidence in the U.S. new single-family home market was up for the fourth month in September 2014, to hit 59 on the National Association of Home Builders/Wells Fargo Housing Market Index (HMI). This four-point gain elevates the index to its highest point since November of 2005.
The majority of America's chain restaurants held the line on price hikes the first part of the year but plan to start raising them, according to a new survey from SpenDifference, a restaurant supply chain co-op.
Private companies, expecting revenue growth to soar far past that of gross domestic product (GDP), are in a hiring mode not seen since pre-recession days.
While various GDP forecasts for the United States call for 2014 growth of less than 3 percent, the average predicted revenue gain for the next 12 months, among 213 private companies surveyed by PricewaterhouseCoopers between January and April, was 8.5 percent.
U.S. retail and consumer merger & acquisition activity during the first quarter of 2014 was primarily driven by five multibillion-dollar transactions, with more than half aligned to the food and beverage sector, confirming a positive deals outlook for the year, according to PwC's U.S. retail and consumer deals insights Q1 2014 report.
An estimated 208,000 new non-farm jobs were added to U.S. payrolls in April, according to D&B's May U.S Economic Health Tracker. This report provides a monthly, multidimensional perspective on the U.S. economy, including small business health, total job growth, and overall U.S. business health.
The most recent earnings for Dollar General and Dollar Tree were healthier than rival Family Dollar's, but each one missed Wall Street's estimates as the economy has begun to improve.
