Industrial production in the US in July surprised to the upside in the release today. IP rose 0.6% MoM (June was revised slightly lower, however) and is 1.3% higher YoY.
Overall, as the data below indicates, global manufacturing is at a relative mid-point compared to the past 10-years according to the Markit PMI surveys. We are not seeing the strong PMI data that we saw from 2005-2007 or out of the 2008 recession, but fortunately we are also not in the midst of a manufacturing recession either.
At this point, we need to acknowledge Ineichen Research and Management for their very useful data presentation which we borrowed for the tables below. In the two tables below, we show the past 10-years (where the data is available) of various Markit PMI data by country with the most recent data on the right hand side of the table. The top table shows developed world countries and the bottom shows emerging market countries. Each row is formatted from high (green) to low (red). As you can see, the latest data for most countries is yellow. There are a few exceptions with some European countries experiencing more robust PMI levels while Canada, Greece and Indonesia seeing a slowdown in their PMI levels to varying degrees.
