Econ & Market Indicators Report Updated for September 2024

NFPA’s Econ and Market Indicators (EMI) report has been updated for September. The EMI report pulls together data from multiple sources to provide the latest trends for:

• Customer Markets (U.S. Census Bureau)
• Economic Indicators (U.S. Census Bureau)
• Industrial Production (Federal Reserve)
• Capacity Utilization (Federal Reserve)
• Producer Price Index (Bureau of Labor Statistics)

Highlights from the updated report include the following:

• Construction
  • As shown in the EMI report, September construction equipment shipments were down -5.9% m/m, and -10.5% y/y from September 2023. Additionally, Total Construction Spending: Manufacturing in the US’s growth rate has been slowing throughout 2024 as the 3/12 and 12/12 rates of change have been decreasing consistently during the year.
  • Oxford Economics’ special report on construction spending in the United States corroborates the EMI report. Oxford writes that spending growth in the sector is nearing the end of the line. They further claim that real construction spending is ‘firmly’ in in decelerating growth territory.
• Chemical and Pharmaceutical
  • The updated EMI report shows that pharmaceutical and medicine manufacturing shipments continue to trend upward with August shipments being up 2.4% m/m and 9.2% y/y. Chemical product manufacturing shipments are trending positively aside from a slight contraction of -2.2% m/m.
• Farm Machinery and Equipment
  • The EMI report shows farm machinery and equipment industrial production has continued trending downwards on a 12-month average and September levels were recorded at -6.0% y/y. Farm machinery and equipment shipments this September were -13.3% m/m and -2.4% y/y.
  • In Oxford’s Fluid Power report on the United States, Oxford forecasts agricultural machinery to have an annual percent change of -1.6 % at the end of 2024 and grow to 3.4% in 2025.
• Petroleum Refineries
  • Petroleum Refinery shipments, according to the EMI report, are down -8.3% m/m and 17.1% y/y this September. Industrial production index for petroleum refineries were 90.6 in August, which was down -3.5% m/m and just -0.3% y/y. Smoothed out using 12mma, the petroleum refineries industrial production index have been shallowly pulling up throughout 2024.

The EMI report can be accessed at this link: https://nfpahub.com/reports/econ-market-indicator/. An excel file with all the raw data is also available to download for internal analysis. Members can view individual series and apply different calculations such as moving averages and rates of change.

The Oxford Economics Construction Spending report referenced in this article can be found at this link: https://nfpahub.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/US-PiP-cycle-FINAL.pdf

The Oxford Economics Fluid Power report referenced in this article can be found at this link: https://nfpahub.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/NFPA_Sep24.pdf

Questions? Contact Cecilia Bart at cbart@nfpa.com or 414-259-2027.