Orders come in… machines go out. Numbers go up and down. If you want to know where the U.S. manufacturing sector is heading, the monthly U.S. Manufacturing Technology Orders report delivered by AMT - the Assn. for Manufacturing Technology is the most reliable index of future activity.
But USMTO will not tell you what is happening now. There’s another reliable index to that information.
To sort it out we interviewed AMT’s chief economist Chris Chidzik, who explains what job shops’ and OEMs’ ordering activity tell us about the health and direction of the manufacturing economy.