Yesterday I made some snarky comments about the MainStream Media's rather pessimistic spin on the August ISM report on business activity. This morning I felt a little bad about doing that -- but then I got over it.
Here is a graph of the index, extending back over the past fifteen years.
While it is true that the level of the index in August slipped off its recent heights, those levels were unusually high. The current level is still above any value realized in the boom years of the latter half of the 90s. It's just one statistic, of course, and there may be plenty of good reasons to remain anxious about the current economic environment, but is "Factories falter" really the right alliteration?