German Factory Orders Fall 10.6% in August, Biggest Drop Since January

The headline number overstates the weakness: stripping out large-scale orders leaves a near-flat reading, and the three-month trend is still positive, so this looks more like lumpy big-ticket volatility than a broad industrial collapse. Still, the scale of the miss against expectations matters for a German manufacturing base already sensitive to global demand. The open question is whether the large-order swings keep masking a genuinely flat underlying order book, or whether the three-month improvement reasserts itself.