US Manufacturing

Wow. The good people at the Institute for Supply Management survey American manufacturers every month and ask, “how’s business?” They then create a diffusion index based on those responses: a scale from 0 to 100, where 0 is no one says business is improving and 100 is everyone says it’s getting better. So 50 means it’s evenly split. Historically, 60 has represented a high mark, 40 a low mark, although there have been occasions beyond this range.

The October index jumped to 59, and the new orders index rose to nearly 66. The strong reading translates to a real GDP growth rate of 5.2%. That may be a bit high, but here we have another datum that the US economy is picking up steam.

• 11 Nov, 2014

  Logistics

  Not enough attention is being paid to the work slowdown/stoppage going on at West Coast ports.The last time there was a ...

• 15 Oct, 2014

  MLPs

  Some historical data from Credit Suisse below: MLPs are off 14% this month, pretty bad. Subsequent performance (no ...

• 15 Dec, 2014

  Europe Sputters, US Cruises

  Europe's unemployment rate is 11.5%. Europe is currently growing at less than 1%. A rule of thumb is that it takes ...