The Empire State Manufacturing Index: February 2010

The Empire State Manufacturing Survey, like the Philadelphia Federal Reserve’s Business Outlook Survey and the ISM’s Manufacturing Report on Business, consists of a series of diffusion indices distilled from a monthly survey of New York regional manufacturing executives and seeks to identify trends across 22 different current and future manufacturing related activities.

Today’s report indicated a continued improvement with the current business conditions index continuing to rise to 24.9 and the future conditions index declining only slightly to an optimistic 52.78 indicating that an expansion in manufacturing activity is underway.

Current and future new orders also continued to indicate expansion though the future outlook has deteriorated a bit with a reading of just 8.78 while current conditions remained well within expansion territory at 55.56.

The current and future outlook for inventories continued to improve with the current index surging to 0.0 while the future index showed a 12.5.



The ISM’s PMI Composite index correlates well with the Empire State Manufacturing Survey’s Current General Conditions index again confirming that improvement is underway.