Following in the footsteps of a stellar manufacturing PMI from Europe overnight, locally the AIG PMI was just release this morning, showing another month of expansion. The index increased by just over 1 point to be at 55.4 in December 2016:
That’s a solid uptrend from the 2013 nadir, which just happens to correlate with a fall in the Australian dollar from over parity with the USD to its current scraping along at 70 cent level.
AIG’s Innes Willox remarks:
“Despite a small fall in sector-wide employment in December, manufacturing production, sales, exports, and new orders all grew strongly in the month, providing a running start to the new year. Four of the five larger manufacturing sub-sectors – food & beverages; petroleum, coal, chemicals & rubber products; non-metallic mineral products; and machinery and equipment – saw healthy growth while the metal products sub-sector closed a difficult year in the red.
So despite the closing of the automotive industry – a disaster that the sector will probably never recover from – things are looking up, even as do-nothing Turnbull considers his navel for 2017.
The full report can be found here at AIG.