We’ve just had the numbers for the United States’ manufacturing and industrial output for August and they’re both down 0.4%. Much will be said about this, there will be agonising and insistences that we must do something, anything. And yet the truth is that manufacturing simply isn’t important as a part of the economy these days. The attention we all pay to it is simply an historical overhang from when it was more important. Give it long enough and we’ll start to give this number the attention it properly deserves – perhaps a little more than the near nothing we devote to the agricultural production numbers but no more than that.
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