Courtesy of Mish.
The regional economic reports from the Fed, as well as independent reports from the ISM, have been interesting to watch.
In general, recent reports have been strong, but factory output hasn’t matched. Such is the nature of diffusion indexes where the direction of trends is far more important than the reported quantity.
For example, two small companies hiring 3 workers each is twice as important as one large company firing 500 workers. The same holds true for all of the components in the survey.
There are also wide variances between reports that are supposed to measure the same thing. Let’s investigate today’s examples.
The above data from ISM Report on Business
Import and export numbers in the above table are highly questionable even though the advance trade reading from the Census bureau was on goods only, not goods and services.
For details, please see Trade Deficit Unexpectedly Widens: Exports Sink, Imports Up Sharply.
We will know more when the complete trade report comes out.
