If you were looking to US factory floors for evidence to support a bullish domestic macro narrative, silly you. The world’s largest economy doesn’t make widgets, it makes obese people.

I’m just joking. Gallows humor to set up yet another lackluster read on the marquee gauge of manufacturing activity in America.

The ISM headline for July printed just 48 on Friday. That was below estimates, down from the prior month and the 30th contraction-territory reading in 33 months.

Have a look at that chart. Does that look, to you, like a salvageable situation? No? Me neither. But “Trump will fix it,” apparently. Just you wait.

To be fair, both the production and new orders gauges improved from June, but the latter, at 47.1, remains forlorn and beset.

“79% of the [manufacturing sector’s] GDP contracted in July, up from 46% in June,” ISM’s Susan Spence said, adding that nearly a third of GDP is “strongly contracting,” which means registering a composite PMI of 45 or below. (As a quick aside: Spence succeeded the long-serving Tim Fiore last month.)

Now to the punchline. In one of those coincidences which makes you question whether, perhaps, there are higher powers and they delight in playing cruel jokes, the ISM employment index slipped to 43.4 for July, which is exactly — and by “exactly,” I mean to the tenth — the reading which undercut risk sentiment on this very same day last year, when a weak NFP release and a lackluster showing on factory employment started tipping dominoes.

As I put it a year ago today, when the FOMC likewise eschewed an opportunity to ease ahead of ISM and NFP, “Should’ve cut!”

On the bright side, the ISM prices gauge fell to 64.8, still elevated but well below June’s nosebleed reading and much cooler than the 70 consensus.

Meanwhile, the final July read on S&P Global’s manufacturing PMI for the US was 49.8, “down noticeably [from] June and [the] first overall deterioration of operating conditions in 2025 so far,” as the color accompanying the release put it.

“Tariff worries,” S&P Global’s chief business economist Chris Williamson said, “continued to dominate the business environment.”