May 16, 2015
For some reason major news outlets like the NYT and WaPo chose not to report on the Federal Reserve Board’s release of data on industrial output for April. This release showed that manufacturing output was flat in April leaving output roughly half a percentage point below the November level. Meanwhile capacity utilization, which is often a forerunner of investment in new plant and equipment, dropped to 77.2 percent, 0.9 percentage points below its November level.
The weakness is manufacturing is not surprising given the sharp rise in the trade deficit in the quarter and especially in March. The rise in the deficit is presumably the result of the run-up in the value of the dollar in the second half of 2014. The new data should have warranted at least a short article in these papers.
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