The first of this week’s top-tier US macro data suggested America’s factories remained mired in recession as the book closed on 2025.

At 47.9, the ISM manufacturing headline printed a 14-month low. Consensus wanted 48.4.

I’m not sure too many people care about this by now. It’s been so long since this allegedly all-important indicator was anything other than lackluster that I, for one, have given it up for dead.

There’s the chart. December marked the 35th month in 38 that the marquee measure of US manufacturing tipped a contraction.

The subindexes were generally poor, even as a few key metrics inched up. Production printed 51, down from 51.4 in November. New orders remained very subdued at just 47.7.

For the eleventh consecutive month — and the 28th in 31 — the employment gauge came in below the 50 demarcation line at 44.9.

As the figure shows, that’s a lost cause just like the headline. We’re not “bringing back American manufacturing.”

Mercifully, the prices index didn’t rise. But at 58.5, it’s still indicative of fairly pervasive upward pressure on input costs which, in conjunction with ongoing weakness on the employment metric, is suggestive of stagflation.

“Morale is very low across manufacturing in general,” a panelist in Electrical Equipment, Appliances & Components said, on the way to delivering a rather dire assessment of the operating environment which could easily double as a description of American society itself: “The cost of living is very high, it’s cold [and] things look a bit bleak overall.”