Three of the five regional Feds that report on their region’s state of the economy have now reported for April. With one exception in the data, everything is negative.

On the manufacturing side, the NY Fed reported last week that now orders had gotten “less bad,” improving +6.1 to -8.8, which is actually in line with most of the monthly readings from the NY Fed since the beginning of 2022:

The Philly Fed, on the other hand, reported that new orders collapsed to -34.2, which is the worst reading of the past 10 years except for the two Covid lockdown months in 2020:

And this morning the Richmond Fed reported that new orders had declined -11 to -15. Aside from last summer, this is in line with the worst readings since the Covid lockdowns as well:

The average of the three for April is -19.3.

Since manufacturing is now far less important to the economy than services, to gauge the impact of T—-p’s economic moves, I am now also following the services indexes as well.

Last week the NY Fed reported that services deteriorated very slightly, by -0.5 to -19.8:

This morning the Philly Fed reported *positive* general business conditions, up +1.3 to +6.9. This is the sole positive report for any regional Fed this month:

And the Richmond Fed also reported this morning that business conditions declined -16 to -30 (note below graph is not updated yet):

The average of the three for April is -14.3.

In general the three regional Fed’s are suggesting that the broader services economy is in the worst shape since 2022, when inflation was at its worst post-pandemic. Since that even did not quite spill into recession territory, we shouldn’t get too far over our skis at this point.

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