The latest release of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia Business Outlook Survey (BOS) for October indicated a notable improvement in the regions manufacturing activity with the current activity index jumping to a level of 8.7 while the future activity index also improved to a level of 27.2.
While most component measures turned around in October, it's important to note that most measures still signal notable weakness for manufacturing activity... clearly, more data is needed in order to get a more complete sense of how the economy is trending.
The following chart shows the current and future activity indexes both with their corresponding 3-month moving averages. The red line marks the threshold between contraction and expansion for these diffusion indexes.
