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Price Pressures Pick Up Sharply In Vast US Services Sector
The implacable US services sector outperformed in December. More importantly, price pressures accelerated sharply.
That's according to the first of this week's top-tier macro releases out of the US.
At 54.1, the ISM services headline improved from the prior month and printed marginally ahead of consensus, but the business activity gauge, at 58.2, jumped meaningfully, suggesting the biggest part of the world's largest economy hit on most, if perhaps not all, cylinders during the holiday season.
This is a really tough economic picture to figure out. More facts don’t even help, the picture is so muddled. I tend to be a critical, but under these circumstances it is really unfair to be highly confident of either fiscal or monetary policy actions, for now at least.