Guess what? Activity across the US economy picked up in early October when businesses and, apparently, consumers, ignored the soap opera inside the Beltway.

Preliminary PMI data released by S&P Global on Friday suggested the world’s largest economy sustained a 2.5% annualized growth rate in the earliest days of Q4 following a similarly resilient showing in Q3.

55.2 on the flash read for the services measure counted as a solid print, and 52.2 on the manufacturing side could certainly be worse. Both of those readouts were better than the final prints for September.

As the figure shows, there’s no evidence on these gauges of a drop-off, let alone any sort of “Wile E. Coyote” moment.

That said, the government shutdown’s expected to weigh on growth eventually, and the editorial accompanying Friday’s release wasn’t nearly as rosy as the headline prints. In fact, it was outright dour.

“Business confidence in the outlook for the coming year has deteriorated further, and is at one of the lowest levels seen over the past three years as companies worry about the impact of policies, most notably tariffs,” S&P Global’s Chris Williamson remarked, describing “an unprecedented rise in unsold stock” among US exporters on the factory side of the economy.

He went on to outline a vexing situation for American manufacturers who “bought excess inputs earlier in the year to front-run tariffs,” but are now discovering that demand for their final products is lacking. It’s not, Williamson suggested, that the tariffs aren’t pushing up costs. They are. It’s that some producers are unable to pass those costs along.

Accordingly, average selling price inflation was the coolest in six months amid competition for scarce buyers, the report indicated. That dynamic, more than anything else, may account for the absence of tariff-related price pressure in September’s realized inflation data released by the BLS on a delay Friday.

So, things are ok for now. But maybe not for long.