MacroScope

2012 has been a year to forget for Brazil’s struggling industry – just like the year before. But a weekly central bank survey of around 90 financial institutions says that will all change next year and industry will grow at healthy 4 percent pace.

Will it?  One year ago, the same survey predicted 4.1 percent growth for 2012. Despite massive stimulus by President Dilma Rousseff’s government, including record-low interest rates and billions of dollars in tax cuts that were off everyone’s radar, industrial output in Latin America’s largest economy is set to fall by 2.3 percent.

The same pattern happened the year before. Two months before the start of 2011, analysts expected an expansion of 5.3 percent in Brazil’s industrial output but in the end it grew by only 0.3 percent.

Have economists been overoptimistic?

Luciano Rostagno, chief strategist at WestLB in Sao Paulo, said his 2013 forecasts consider a gradual recovery of the global economy and the effects of all the stimulus provided by Brazilian authorities. His estimate for industrial output is even more positive: 5 percent growth.

But the risks are clear, he admitted.

If global economic growth remains sluggish, Brazilian entrepreneurs may postpone their investment plans even further, despite all the stimulus offered by the government.

U.S. manufacturing activity shrank for a second straight month in July as recent economic weakness spilled into the third quarter, according to the Institute for Supply Management’s closely watched index. But that wasn’t the worst of it: new orders, a gauge of future business activity, also shrank for a second month, albeit at a slightly slower pace.

Tom Porcelli at RBC explains why the status quo may not be good enough to keep the economy expanding:

The historical record back to 1955 suggests a rather ominous outcome when ISM new orders remain at 48 or less for two straight months. In fully 75% of those instances we were hurtling toward recession. The recent headfakes occurred in 1995 during the mid-cycle slowdown and in 2003 shortly after the recession ended and when the housing boom was in its infancy. Our call remains that we’ll (barely) skirt a recession but with evidence mounting that the economic headwinds are placing significant downward pressure on economic output, we find it striking that forecasters – as bearish as we’ve been told they are – still expect growth to average 2.2% in the second half of the year.

The closely watched Institute of Supply Management’s nationwide manufacturing index showed contraction in manufacturing for the second month in a row in July and Bradley Holcomb, chairman of the ISM’s business survey committee, sounded equally subdued in a morning teleconference.

An overall softening and flattening is going on. It’s a reflection of the overall state of the global economy.

New orders for manufactured goods also shrank for the second straight month, and backlogged orders fell for the fourth straight month. Prices weakened for the third month. Said Holcomb:

Ellen Freilich contributed to this post

The Fed did the twist. Will it shout as well? There has been some debate among economists about whether the U.S. central bank might launch a third round of outright bond buys or QE3 given that it just prolonged Operation Twist.

But a truly grim report on the U.S. manufacturing sector from the Institute for Supply Management, if coupled with further evidence of a deteriorating labor market, could certainly induce policymakers to press their foot to the monetary accelerator.

Not only did the index slip below 50 in June, pointing to a contraction for the first time in three years, but the reading of 49.7 was lower than the lowest forecast in a Reuters poll of economists. Moreover, the subcomponents showed the biggest drop in new orders since the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001.

Ouch. That was the general sentiment after this morning’s strikingly weak durable goods report for January, which suggested the Federal Reserve was right to flag slowing business investment as a worry in its January statement.

Chris Williamson, chief economist at Markit, wonders if this is the start of a trend:

The big question is whether the downturn in January is merely a statistical wobble in what we must remember is a very volatile data series, or whether demand for U.S. goods really slumped at the start of 2012. Reassuringly, other data sources such as business surveys suggest that demand has remained fairly resilient, and it seems unlikely that the disappointing performance will be replicated in coming months. However, these order book numbers remind us exactly why many policymakers are extremely cautious about the underlying strength of the US economy and that the recovery looks set to be a bumpy ride over the coming year.

Manufacturing activity picked up in January, an encouraging sign for U.S. growth prospects. Right? Perhaps not as much as it used to be. The shrinking role of factory production in the U.S. economy – now just over a tenth of the nation’s output – means the Institute for Supply Management’s closely watched survey is a less sturdy predictor of broader trends.

Neil Dutta, U.S. economist at Bank of America-Merrill Lynch, explains:

The ISM Manufacturing Index improved to 54.1 in January from 53.1 in December, the highest since June 2011 and broadly in line with market expectations. A level of 54.1 on ISM is consistent with roughly 3.5 percent real GDP growth. This tells you more about the state of the manufacturing sector than the broader economy, in our view. And, we are skeptical the pick-up in the ISM manufacturing index is a harbinger of a coming acceleration in economic growth.

A 3.5 percent rate looks lofty indeed: Current expectations according to Reuters polls are for a 2 percent GDP reading in the first quarter, with a number of analysts citing downside risks to their forecasts.

It used to be the low-end stuff like shoes, clothes and furniture that displaced American manufacturing, then cars and consumer electronics.  A new report by Alan Tonelson, a researcher at the U.S. Business and Industry Council which represents 1,500 American companies, now shows that high-end U.S. industry is facing ever tougher foreign competition in its own backyard.

Tonelson has crunched the numbers since 1997 on high-value, advanced manufacturing – the crown jewel of American industry that is capital intensive and depends on technological superiority such as turbines, pharmaceuticals and electrical engineering. He finds that imported products had captured 38 percent of the $1.63 trillion U.S. market for advanced manufactured products by 2010, up from 24.5 percent when the government started collected the data in 1997.  Only six U.S.-based advanced manufacturers have gained market share in the United States in the 13-year period.  Sectors that are more than 50 percent dominated by foreign producers have risen from eight in 1997 to 32 by 2010, he said.

The high-value core of America’s domestic manufacturing sector is suffering chronic and significant weaknesses. They strongly indicate that advanced U.S.-based manufacturing industries as a whole are failing a basic test of competitiveness – thriving in a market that is not only the world’s largest single market for such goods, but the market that they should know far better than their overseas counterparts.

U.S. manufacturing activity slowed to a crawl in October, according to the latest figures from the Institute for Supply Management. Still, a measure of new orders picked up steam, suggesting some prospect for an improvement in demand.

Which signal to trust? Rather than put too much weight on one month’s number, better to pick up on the trend. Here, the story is largely unchanged: growth does not appear on the verge of stalling, but nor is it fast enough to help the economy dig out of the unemployment hole caused by the Great Recession.

Paul Dales, senior U.S. economist at Capital Economics, writes:

Economic conditions seem just about strong enough to avoid a recession, but not strong enough to generate any meaningful growth. We expect much of the same next year, with GDP growth slowing from just above 2% this year to around 1.5%.

Excluding the monthly employment report, gross domestic product is the Big Kahuna of economic indicators. For better or worse — and to the chagrin of its creator Simon Kuznets — GDP has become  the scorecard of a country’s economic performance.

Yet for financial markets seeking to anticipate the future, GDP always comes a little too late. Case in point: we only get the first estimate of second quarter GDP next week, almost a full month into the third quarter.

The number still has a big psychological impact. It sets the tone for forecast revisions, and the report’s composition, particularly the mix of consumer spending and business investment, offers clues about upcoming trends. GDP is projected to have risen just 1.8 percent in the second quarter, even more paltry than the first quarter’s 1.9 percent clip. The range of forecasts is pretty wide: from 0.9 percent at the low end all the way to 2.9 percent at the top.

Ben Bernanke has taken some flack for his argument that “green shoots” of economic activity might lurk around the corner. In one such swipe, Justin Fox of Time Magazine argued that the metaphor is flawed because what we’re really talking about is a moderation of contraction, not growth.

Today’s Beige Book, a collection of anecdotal economic evidence compiled by the Fed, showed only a few very faint positive signs. On housing, the report said the “number of potential buyers” was rising — not exactly a sure sign of a bottom.

But at least the New York Fed’s regional factory data suggested that the Fed chief’s green shoots might just see the light of day. Again, it was mostly a story about lesser deterioration, but an improvement nonetheless. Apart from a much better than expected reading on the overall index (which is still, it must be noted, at -14.65), there was a huge rise in the new orders index (Also still negative, but now at -3.88, from -44.76).