The snippet below from Econoday’s highlights of today’s U.S. Industrial Production report speaks to what we’ve been preaching herein ad nauseam for the past couple of years: Protectionist policies (read tariffs) — as I attribute no small measure of the present global slowdown to such — are unequivocally no way to promote a nation’s economy at large, let alone even the sector(s) such acts are ostensibly designed to protect: emphasis mine…
“But it’s manufacturing and whether the sector, outward facing as it is toward the global economy, is at risk of sinking into the negative column this year. This may not be an exaggeration based on a second month of contraction for production that follows a revised 0.5 percent January decline. Occasional dips into negative ground aren’t that unusual for this component but this is the first back-to-back decline since mid-2017 which is right in line with signals from recent regional surveys including the Philadelphia Fed and Empire State reports.”