US manufacturing activity improved in December, but contracted nevertheless, while underlying measures of input prices and employment pointed to stagflation, as usual.

That’s all according to top-tier macro data released on Friday, when the ISM headline printed 49.3, topping the 48.2 consensus.

It was the “best” (in scare quotes) read since March, but the struggle to print above the 50 demarcation line (which separates expansion from contraction) speaks to the intractable nature of America’s factory malaise.

Suffice to say the world’s largest economy remains a hopelessly bifurcated beast, reliant almost entirely on a services sector which, with China stuck in a deflationary quasi-recession, plays Atlas to the global growth impulse.

Optimists will point to the new orders gauge in the ISM release, which printed 52.5, the highest in nearly a year. The production gauge was also in expansion territory, albeit just barely.

Pessimists (and click-chasing tabloids) will parrot the same, old exhausted stagflation jokes, courtesy of the same old (admittedly inauspicious) juxtaposition between the employment gauge and prices paid. The latter rose to 52.5 for December, indicative of input cost pressure.

The employment measure moved meaningfully lower, to 45.3, reversing a nascent rebound from November.

It’s not that I think the stagflation narrative’s dubious, it’s just that it’s so familiar by now in the context of these ISM factory reports that I rarely have to change the chart text. (The chart header and deck on the figure above are verbatim from June, July, August, September and October.)

I suppose that’s the point: Stagflation’s ubiquitous. At least on the manufacturing side of the US economy which, “thankfully,” doesn’t count in post-globalization, de-industrialized America.