If you were looking for more evidence to support a US slowdown narrative that’s much closer to being consensus after last week’s “RIGGED” jobs report, a key gauge of services sector activity obliged on Tuesday.

The headline print from ISM was 50.1, down from the prior month and below consensus. Economists were looking for 51.5 from this week’s only top-tier US macro release.

By contrast, the final read on S&P Global’s services sector gauge for the US in July was 55.7, up from the flash print and a seven-month high.

Note that the last truly decent ISM services print was in February. The headline’s struggled to sustain itself in expansion territory since the onset of “Trade War 2.0.”

As most readers are surely aware, the S&P Global PMIs are only relevant for traders until the ISM releases. So, the flash prints on the S&P Global surveys are tradable, the final prints not so much given they’re released on the same day as the monthly ISM reports.

Most of the ISM anecdotes mentioned the tariffs and every key subindex deteriorated. Business activity slipped to 52.6 (from 54.2) and new orders fell a point, to 50.3. The employment gauge slipped to just 46.4. Recall that the employment measure on the manufacturing side printed a pretty egregious 43.4 last week.

Even more concerning: The prices gauge on the services side jumped to almost 70 for July, Tuesday’s release showed. That’s very high, and when considered with another sub-50 print on the hiring measure, suggests the biggest part of the world’s largest economy is succumbing to stagflation.

Pervasive price pressures are about the only thing the two surveys (ISM and S&P Global) agreed on. “[S]trengthening of demand has led to rising backlogs of work in the service sector, encouraging firms to take on staff again,” S&P Global’s Chris Williamson said Tuesday. “There was some caution seen in terms of hiring and expansion, however, linked to sharply rising costs, often attributed to tariffs.”

Who knows, maybe it’ll all work out. After all: TACO. “The tariff talk has turned out to be much more bluster than actual policy,” someone in real estate told ISM. “Businesses have seemed to tune out the noise.”