ISM Printed 55.5 and S&P Global 54.9 — the Order Inverted and They Disagree About Prices.
We published at 06:20 that two American manufacturing surveys would print fifteen minutes apart with expectations 1.4 points apart, and that the ISM at 15:00 was the one with the risk in it.
Both have printed and we were wrong about the window. S&P Global's final was expected at 56.0 — the flash copied forward, with one wire reporting a Bloomberg survey expecting no revision at all — and printed 54.9, a miss of 1.1 at 14:45. The ISM was expected at 54.6 and printed 55.5, a beat of 0.9 at 15:00, issuer-stamped 10:00 Eastern. So the 1.4-point gap closed to 0.6 and the order inverted: the survey with the lower expectation printed higher. The lesson is that a forecast-equals-prior row on a final revision is correctly constructed, exactly as we argued, and correctly constructed is not the same as low variance — we conflated the two. The sharper finding is that the surveys disagree about prices. The ISM's Prices index fell to 75.2 from 77.9 against a 78.0 consensus, labelled increasing at a slower rate, while S&P Global's own release puts output price inflation at its highest since September 2022 and input costs at the highest since May. Employment disagrees too: ISM 52.4 from 52.7 and a miss, against S&P Global calling payroll growth the steepest in five and a half years — opposite signs four days before the 13:30 UTC payrolls print on 6 November. Both surveys closed their collection on 27 October.