Tag Archives: manufacturing sector

Manufacturing sector continues to be on fire; but real construction spending plunges August data started out mixed.  The ISM manufacturing index continued to show strong expansion. Both the overall and new orders components declined slightly m/m, but at 59.5 and 64.9 remained far about the breakeven point between expansion and contractions of 50.0: The simplest way to read this is that the manufacturing sector remains on fire. The...

On October 5, the White House released a 139-page report, "Assessing and Strengthening the Manufacturing and Defense Industrial Base and Supply Chain Resiliency of the United States." The report had been originally due to be completed in April, but the deadline was extended, due to the importance of the study and the involvement of the Defense Department, the Commerce Department, the Treasury Department and the White House in researching and writing it. The report is unclassified (there...

One of the problems with many theoretical approaches to the business cycle is that there is an implicit bias towards a manufacturing economy. The modelling of business sector decision making for manufacturing is quite different than for the service sector. This matters, as the developed economies are increasingly services-driven (figure above). For consumer-facing service industries, output is largely demand-driven. This fits much better with the post-Keynesian approach. This article is...