America’s “golden age” manufacturing renaissance lost some of its luster in August, even as the marquee measure of factory activity spent an eighth month in expansion.

That was the overarching takeaway from the first of this week’s top-tier US macro data. Don’t stop reading just yet. There’s some amusing color waiting for you below, but I’m duty-bound to run through the numbers first.

The ISM manufacturing headline printed 54.6 for August, marginally below the 55.2 consensus expected.

As the figure above shows, it was the second-best readout of the current streak despite the slippage.

The underlying demand measures painted a similar picture. The production index ticked down to a still-robust 58.3, while new orders suffered a more meaningful decline, dropping 3ppt to 53.7. That was a five-month low and constituted a wide miss to expectations.

As far as the employment-prices conjuncture, the jobs measure fell to 51.2, down from July and below estimates. The prices metric stuck at 71.1. Economists expected a slight decrease.

Recall that the employment gauge printed in expansion territory for the first time in a long time in July. So, August’s print, disappointing or not, counted as a second straight expansionary read on net hiring inclinations in the factory sector. That’s good news.

As for prices, anything north of 60 (to say nothing of 70) is indicative of pervasive input cost pressure. So, there’s no sugarcoating August’s print on that metric. It was bad news.

The respondent anecdotes were especially entertaining. Suffice to say there’s a lot of concern regarding the extent to which the 2020s are a story of rolling, existential supply shocks, from pestilence to war to the Skynet buildout.

“[The] supply chain situation is going through another crisis even bigger and more complicated than during and post-COVID-19,” someone in Computer & Electronic Products remarked. “Supply markets are increasingly challenging [with] each month more difficult than the previous one,” someone else in the same business sighed.

But it was a panelist in Chemical Products who stole the show. “The economy is annoying; it is getting in the way of otherwise good business,” he or she complained, adding that although their company’s “making great new products,” they’re “struggling to compete” amid escalating prices due to “things like tariffs and the conflict in the Strait of Hormuz.”

“Call it inflation!”, the same person exclaimed. “At some point, it leads to an economic downturn. or at least economic pain for many consumers.”