Could’ve been worse. But it was still pretty bad.

That’s my take on Wednesday’s ISM manufacturing readout for September.

With the US government shutdown, traders are relying on private sector macro releases to get a sense of the economic trajectory. In that regard, ADP hiring was a bit of a shin kick. With the caveat that the annual benchmarking exercise was to blame for the low print, private payrolls shrank last month, underscoring labor market concerns and casting doubt on a re-acceleration narrative built around a run of hard data beats.

That’s the context for ISM’s factory activity update, which is already a top-tier release even in the absence of Beltway bickering. At 49.1, the headline remained in contraction territory, but that’s just par for the course. Consensus wanted 49 (“flat” or “even,” so to speak), so the update counted as a beat, albeit by the thinnest of margins.

The final read on S&P Global’s manufacturing PMI for the US, also released on Wednesday, was 52 for September, unchanged from the flash reading. As the figure above reminds you, the ISM headline’s managed just three prints above 50 in 36 months, which is to say we’re in a three-year (and counting) US factory recession.

This is where I get to indulge my penchant for abrasiveness: We’re not “bringing back American manufacturing,” regardless of who says we are. I don’t care if it’s Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Kamala Harris or Jesus Christ talking, if they tell you “Vote for me, I’m going to resurrect American manufacturing,” they’re a charlatan and they’re lying to you. No different than if they told you Tylenol definitively causes autism. No different than if they told you they can heal the blind. No different than if they told you they can meaningfully change the socioeconomic trajectory of African Americans in the country without reparations.

With that out of the way, there were some evanescent silver linings in the ISM release, most notably the employment gauge which rose to 45.3. To be clear, that’s still awful, but it was less awful than August. The same assessment’s applicable to the price index, which moved lower to 61.9. That isn’t good (i.e., it’s indicative of uncomfortably pervasive input cost pressure), but it at least marked an improvement from August.

All positive spin aside, we’re still looking at a demonstrably stagflationary setup. “We believe we are in a stagflation period where prices are up but orders are down due to tariff policy, and customers are not willing to pay the higher prices, so they are just not buying,” as one ISM respondent put it, adding that reducing overhead now entails “letting go of experienced workers.”

Note that the new orders gauge slipped back into contraction territory in September. And I should emphasize that the ISM employment index has now spent eight months below 50, 15 in 16 and 25 in 28, as illustrated painfully below.

Again, a decade of bipartisan bullsh-t about re-shoring, industrial policy and reinvigorating the nation’s manufacturing base is just that: Bullsh-t. Sorry for the acerbic cadence, but the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Choke on that chart.

The tariffs — those godforsaken tariffs — came up 15 times in the ISM release, including in nearly every respondent anecdote. Indeed, the panelists were brutal this month.

“Profits are down and extreme taxes (tariffs) are being shouldered by all companies in our space,” the same respondent quoted above complained, castigating the trade levies in harsh terms. “The addition of the derivative steel and aluminum tariffs in the middle of the month — with no announcement — was devastating.”

A panelist in Miscellaneous Manufacturing summed it all up in four words: “Tariffs are killing us.”