Dallas Fed
Dallas Fed

Details:

  • General business activity -17.5 vs -15.1 prior
  • Company outlook -18.4 vs -6.9 prior
  • Prices paid +23.1 vs +21.5 prior
  • New orders -12.8 vs -1.3 prior
  • Shipments -16.3 vs +2.8 prior
  • Employment +7.1 vs -2.9 prior

Overall, the details and the commentary are notably worse than the headline.

I wonder if Hurricane Beryl affected some of these numbers because they're not great. At the same time, for this week's non-farm payrolls report, we could also see hurricane effects.

Comments in the report:

Food manufacturing

  • We have seen a more stable market over the last six months for our products (which is primarily dinner sausage). Nielsen data for our category show small-to-moderate growth over the last 52 weeks, and our market share is growing in our core markets. This is leading to a more predictable environment for our company. Wages increased this month due to merit increases that we gave our team at the beginning of our fiscal year, which is July.
  • The business environment feels stable, but beef prices continue to increase beyond typical seasonality due to supply constraints.
  • The destabilization of our country and the politicization of things continue to impact our business.

Paper manufacturing

  • Activity has slowed down, but we anticipate an uptick soon.

Printing and related support activities

  • We have slowed down some from our very hectic pace of activity in late spring and through June. We hear about lots of slowness in our industry, but we continue to be pretty busy, mainly with larger jobs but then also with other smaller ones. We have a very large capital purchase machine arriving in early October. We are hopeful that the Federal Reserve will have a rate cut and that general business activity will pick up. We are actually seeing some reduction in prices and are hopeful we will not need to raise prices next year.

Fabricated metal product manufacturing

  • Hurricane damage and power outages have decreased production.
  • Customer demand is the overriding concern. Decreased credit availability and affordability for the markets we sell into have all but stopped demand. I estimate we are operating at 30–40 percent capacity.
  • Order volume continues to see small declines. Inefficiencies in the short term will require staffing adjustments over the next few months to align with the new lower baseline. There is no major change to our long-term outlook; we are still viewing the current pullback as temporary, and we maintain a positive outlook beyond the next 12–24 months.

Machinery manufacturing

  • Elections [are an issue affecting our business].
  • Business activity is horrible, and we are seeing no signs of improvement.
  • Inquiries and orders activity has seemingly halted. The brakes are on. This is pretty common in presidential election years, but this comes at a time when things were already volatile due to price pressures and massive inflationary pressures.
  • At this point, we're just hoping for a favorable election outcome and looking forward to 2025. The summer doldrums have hit hard and would appear to be unrelenting with respect to what we see in our crystal ball. We have some small jobs to complete, and we're searching wider and further for new work, but we have yet to strike gold.

Computer and electronic product manufacturing

  • Many customers are holding off on expenditures as well as allowing for cost-of-living adjustments to prices. The market continues to be soft, and with uncertainty in the election year, even our federal business is a bit stagnant.
  • We need lower interest rates, so end customers resume buying capital equipment again.
  • We typically see weakness in presidential election years as companies sort through uncertainty or slow down during those periods. With the recent events involving both presumed candidates, that uncertainty has increased, which makes it very difficult to guess what might happen. Our business is likely to be impacted by tariff policies in a negative way because some projects potentially will go away entirely. For businesses we serve that ship to other countries, we have already lost sales because it is more affordable to build those products outside the U.S. for consumption outside the U.S. That was not the case before tariffs entered the equation. We were able to build products for shipment to other parts of the globe. Both [political] parties have shown a willingness to maintain and increase tariffs, which could negatively impact our sales.
  • We are expecting to see stronger signs of a cyclical recovery in industrial and automotive markets, which have not materialized, yet. This is leading to higher uncertainty that the recovery may be delayed or muted.

Transportation equipment manufacturing

  • While we still have a large order backlog, new orders are significantly below where we forecasted them to be this year. This will shorten lead times and should allow us to pick up additional orders next year.

Miscellaneous manufacturing

  • Customer demand is softening. We are also experiencing increasing unfair competition directly from China.
  • Due to the hurricane and not having power for over a week, we had significant lost production hours.