The government has stopped publishing economic indicators, because of the shut-down, though no doubt it suits them as the data are probably less than scintillating. So we have data from non-government analysts, including the Institute of Supply Management (ISM) and S&P Global (PMI).
To increase the signal-to-noise ratio, I extreme-adjust each time series (this removes or attenuates large up or down "spikes"). In addition, if you have two statistically independent time series, the average will have smaller month-to-month fluctuations than either individually.
In the chart below, the dotted red line shows the extreme-adjusted PMI series for manufacturing, the dotted blue line the extreme-adjusted ISM series for manufacturing, and the thick green line the average of these two series. Normally, the PMI and the ISM move more or less in sync. Over the last few months, they haven't, with the PMI rising while the ISM is flat. I don't know what's going on here, but the ISM has been going for many decades, so it has somewhat more credibility. For now, I'll stick with the average, which is just above the 50% recession line, but not by very much. In other words, a sluggish economy. And one, which without spending on AI, would be slumping.
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