Courtesy of Karl Denninger, The Market Ticker
Nothing all that interesting here…
Responses to the Business Outlook Survey suggest that regional manufacturing activity remained weak in July. The survey’s indicators for activity and new orders, which had turned negative last month, recovered somewhat but are at very low positive readings. Firms indicated that employment grew modestly while the average workweek lessened. Indexes for prices show a continuing trend of moderating price pressures. The broadest indicator of future activity improved markedly this month, rebounding from its lowest reading in 31 months in June.
The market seems to like the number, but I’m not impressed.
The problems are here – New orders have basically flat-lined, shipments are up but unfilled orders are negative, which means there’s no capacity issue. This has filtered into the workweek, which is bad for the employed. The only good news is that the number of employees is (weakly) positive, but spreading the hours around to more people doesn’t do much. Finally, the spread between prices paid and received actually widened although prices paid is advancing more-slowly.
Oh, and Liesman on CNBS didn’t bother mentioning that spread, which is, of course what matters when it comes to corporate profitability.
It’s not a disaster print but I wouldn’t call this particularly constructive either.
