Bigger U.S. Advantage over Ezone in Services
November 6, 2013
The differential between the U.S. and Euroland service sector purchasing manager indices increased by 1.3 points to 3.5 in October. That spread was still much smaller than August’s differential and indeed the tightest spread since August 2011. Each region has posted PMI indices of more than 50.0 in both manufacturing and non-manufacturing for the last three months. Between September and August, the U.S. services PMI rose a full point, but Euroland’s slipped by three-tenths of a point.
The improvement in the U.S. report last month was paced by increases of 4.6 points in sales and 3.5 points in jobs, whereas new business fell 2.8 points.
Euroland’s 0.3 month-to-month service PMI decline was mitigated by PMI increases of 3.3 points in Ireland and 0.6 points in Spain. Italy’s service-sector PMI dropped 2.2 points, and the German and French indices slipped 0.8 and 0.1 points, respectively.
The algebraic sum of the manufacturing and service-sector PMI differentials, shown in the right-most column below, climbed to a significant 8.6 points in October, with all of the widening stemming from service-sector activity. Since the start of 2012, only June and September of this year had a narrower combined PMI spread than October’s.
| PMIs | U.S. | Ezone | U.S. | Ezone | Sum of | ||
| Services | Services | Spread | Mf’g | Mf’g | Spread | Spreads | |
| Jan 2012 | 56.8 | 50.4 | +6.4 | 54.1 | 48.8 | +5.3 | +10.9 |
| Feb | 56.1 | 48.8 | +7.3 | 51.9 | 49.0 | +2.9 | +10.2 |
| March | 55.0 | 49.2 | +5.8 | 53.3 | 47.7 | +5.6 | +11.4 |
| April | 53.7 | 46.9 | +6.8 | 54.1 | 45.9 | +8.2 | +15.0 |
| May | 54.1 | 46.7 | +7.4 | 52.5 | 45.1 | +7.4 | +14.8 |
| June | 52.7 | 47.1 | +5.6 | 50.2 | 45.1 | +5.1 | +10.7 |
| July | 52.9 | 47.9 | +5.0 | 50.5 | 44.0 | +6.5 | +11.5 |
| August | 54.3 | 47.2 | +7.1 | 50.7 | 45.1 | +5.6 | +12.7 |
| Sept | 55.2 | 46.1 | +9.1 | 51.6 | 46.1 | +5.5 | +14.6 |
| October | 54.8 | 46.0 | +8.8 | 51.7 | 45.4 | +6.3 | +15.1 |
| November | 54.8 | 46.7 | +8.1 | 49.9 | 46.2 | +3.7 | +11.8 |
| December | 55.7 | 47.8 | +7.9 | 50.2 | 46.1 | +4.1 | +12.0 |
| Jan 2013 | 55.2 | 48.6 | +6.6 | 53.1 | 47.9 | +5.2 | +11.8 |
| February | 56.0 | 47.9 | +8.1 | 54.2 | 47.9 | +6.3 | +14.4 |
| March | 54.4 | 46.4 | +8.0 | 51.3 | 46.8 | +4.5 | +12.5 |
| April | 53.1 | 47.0 | +6.1 | 50.7 | 46.7 | +4.0 | +10.1 |
| May | 53.7 | 47.2 | +6.5 | 49.0 | 48.3 | +0.7 | +7.2 |
| June | 52.8 | 48.3 | +4.5 | 50.9 | 48.8 | +2.1 | +6.6 |
| July | 56.0 | 49.8 | +6.2 | 55.4 | 50.3 | +5.1 | +11.2 |
| August | 58.6 | 50.7 | +7.9 | 55.7 | 51.4 | +4.3 | +12.2 |
| Sept | 54.4 | 52.2 | +2.2 | 56.2 | 51.1 | +5.1 | +7.3 |
| October | 55.4 | 51.9 | +3.5 | 56.4 | 51.3 | +5.1 | +8.6 |
Copyright 2013, Larry Greenberg. All rights reserved. No secondary distribution without express permission.
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