Whatever happened to the fabled double dip? The latest crop of quarterly earnings shows global industry heading skyward. Germany’s Siemens, heralding its “best result of all times” yesterday, displayed a new industrial order book up by almost a third. Operating profit more than doubled at earth movers Caterpillar of the US and Komatsu of Japan. Germans moan about a dearth of engineers; Boeing grumbles about capacity constraints in the supply chain.

Two factors explain the dichotomy. Unlike households and governments (not to mention banks), companies have done much of their deleveraging and are buying machinery and hiring staff. The US ratio of capital expenditure to capital consumption is firmly on the turn, while German unemployment is at its lowest since November 2008. Second, company remits are far more global than that of the average job seeker or sovereign. They are thus focusing on the industrialising nations that are providing the bulk of economic growth. Caterpillar’s second-quarter machinery sales rose 116 per cent and 62 per cent in Latin America and the Asia-Pacific respectively; at current growth rates, the latter would overtake North America in 2013. ABB, the electrical engineering group, is buying out minorities in its Indian unit.

Corporate belief in the business cycle is borne out by macro data. Global industrial production is at record high levels, according to the Dutch Statistics Bureau, led by Asia. But this is backward looking; investors are justifiably sceptical on how far it can run once inventories are restocked and emerging market government cheques exhausted. The rebalancing of global consumption has yet to convince. China’s stimulus has largely gone into infrastructure (some of which local governments will struggle to keep financing), while consumption remains low. Industrial production cannot keep galloping ahead; the upcoming purchasing managers’ index series is likely to show some faltering in momentum. The world is not yet on a roll.