Bad news. More of it.

The marquee gauge of US factory activity flashed a hodgepodge of warning signs in the first of this week’s top-tier US macro data.

No one expected a “good” ISM manufacturing release, but it’s probably fair to call the results worse even than the stagflationary consensus. The headline print was 49, below estimates and a YTD low. In itself, that’s not a disaster, but it was made (much) worse by a meaningful drop on the new orders gauge, which slipped further into contraction territory, at 45.2.

Bad as that is, the real gut punch came from the decidedly poor juxtaposition between the employment gauge, which registered a lackluster 44.7, and the prices index, which shot up to 69.4, a scorching-hot read the likes of which hasn’t been seen since mid-2022, when America was grappling with the worst inflation outbreak in a generation.

The figure gives you a sense of where we are. The employment index is sitting uncomfortably close to the low print from July of 2024, when a dour read on the ISM survey conspired with an unexpectedly poor US jobs report to catalyze a short-lived growth scare. The prices index, meanwhile, is perched at levels last seen when University of Michigan sentiment was busy logging record lows.

This is where I’m supposed to scour the thesaurus for euphemisms to avoid offending the delicate sensibilities of the Trump voters among you, but I don’t know what you want me to say: This is f-cked. Already. ISM prices was 50.3 in November. Now it’s damn near 70. What does that tell you about the tariffs?

And how about the growth-bearish contrast between a new orders gauge on the verge of printing low-40s and a quickly-rising inventories measure? The orders-to-inventories spread is the most negative since May of 2020. What’s that tell you?

I could go on, but the anecdotes from panelists tell the rest of the story for me. There was talk of “Canadians boycotting US products,” “acute shortages” attributable to “Chinese restrictions,” “worldwide economic instability,” “bearish market sentiment” and “customers pulling in orders due to anxiety about continued tariffs.”

The final read on S&P Global’s US factory gauge for March, also released on Tuesday, told a broadly similar story. Hiring “stalled” and input cost inflation “spike[d] to the highest since August of 2022.”

“The strong start to the year for US manufacturers has faltered,” S&P Global’s Chris Williamson said, in the color accompanying the release. “A combination of improved optimism surrounding the new administration and the need to front-run tariffs had buoyed the goods-producing sector, but cracks are now starting to appear.”