Jan. 2010 Industrial Production

The Federal Reserve has released its data for January 2010 industrial production. The headline number showed a 0.9% increase in January compared to December. But, I pay particular attention to consumer durable goods and durable goods excluding motor vehicle and parts industrial production because they give me a good idea on what is happening with metalworking facilities. In this post I’ll focus on the actual indexes and how they are changing. If you would like to see leading indicators for any of the industrial production indexes discussed, or how industrial production leads machine tool sales, then you can find a wealth of information at Metalworking Forecasting Tools (the repository for all of the data I collect and analyze). At that link I use rate of change curves to correlate different industrial production indexes with the appropriate spending data, which are the best leading indicators for industrial production.

To see the rest of this post go to http://www.mmsonline.com/articles/jan-2010-industrial-production.