Business Cycle Indicators: Industrial Production Up, Retail Sales Flattish

and Monthly GDP for August, manufacturing production. First, NBER BCDC indicators:

Figure 1: NFP employment (bold blue), civilian employment with smoothed population controls (bold orange), industrial production (red), personal income excluding current transfers in Ch.2017$ (bold light green), manufacturing and trade sales in Ch.2017$ (black), and monthly GDP in Ch.2017$ (pink), GDP (blue bars), all log normalized to 2025M01=0. Source: BLS via FRED, BLS, Federal Reserve, BEA 2026Q2 3rd release, S&P Global Market Insights (nee Macroeconomic Advisers, IHS Markit) (9/2/2026 release), and author’s calculations.  

Figure 2: Civilian employment adjusted to NFP concept smoothed population controls, using experimental controls for 2025 (bold orange), manufacturing production (red), ADP private nonfarm payroll employment (light green), real retail sales, CPI deflated (black), freight services indexes (brown), and coincident index in Ch.2017$ (pink), GDO (blue bars), all log normalized to 2025M01=0. Source: BLS, ADP via FRED,  Philadelphia Fed, Philadelphia Fed, Bureau of Transportation Statistics, Federal Reserve via FRED, BEA 2026Q2 3rd release, and author’s calculations.

Industrial production beat consensus, while manufacturing met them. Nominal retail sales also beat expectations, but CPI deflated sales were close to flat. Retail sales ex gasoline stations fell in real terms (i.e., deflated by core) actually fell (see Figure 3 below).

Figure 3: Retail sales deflated by CPI (blue), retail sales ex-gasoline states deflated by core CPI (red), both in logs, 2026M02=0. Source: Census, BLS, via FRED, and author’s calculations.