After reading the news feeds during the past few days, I can tell you what my best Christmas gift was: a refreshing break from those news feeds. The-sky-is-falling manufacturing news came in steadily over the holiday, and it didn"t make for fun reading. The Institute for Supply Management"s Manufacturing Index fell to its lowest level since June 1980, and no sector was immune to the drop. New orders, in fact, dropped to their lowest level since ISM began tracking them in 1948. That"s not a good thing. The negative news, according to reports, was even worse than the not-so-rosy predictions made by analysts.
There has not been much good news to be had in any sectoreven those sectors that have been able to carry the overall sector to some extent in the past, Chris Kuehl wrote today in his Business Intelligence Brief e-newsletter. Kuehl is managing director of Lawrence, Kan.-based Armada Corporate Intelligence, and an economist for the Fabricators & Manufacturers Association. Aerospace is down, export-oriented manufacturing is down, all forms of consumer goods manufacturing is down, and, with the decline in oil prices, even the usually robust energy sector is in decline.
When attendees at October"s FABTECH® International & AWS Welding Show told me that times weren"t all that bad in 2008, but they had serious concerns for 2009, it turns out those concerns might just be validated.
