The financial track record of the European space industry is very poor.

Once you’ve cut employees as much as you can, the only thing left to do when you don’t have pricing power is to become more productive, and you do that through capital spending.

The market is looking forward to Friday’s (monthly) unemployment report, so the jobless claims have to be disappointing.

Both these numbers are about everything an investor could want to see in a morning, low inflation and good growth.

The NAPM number was stronger-than-expected but was still under 50, which means a contraction, and there was a big jump in new orders. That was very encouraging. But that doesn’t mean that we’ve hit a...