I took part in a roundtable with a lot of important people (fund managers mostly) late last year. At one point I suggested that the US was just about due a recession. Nonsense, they all said. The US is on a roll and just because it is due a recession time-wise (the current expansion has lasted 80 quarters) doesn't mean it will get one.
I didn't argue much. That would have been like trying to explain to Gordon Brown that he hadn't abolished boom and bust, just before the market explained it to him rather better. But a look at one of the first numbers out for 2016 suggests that the idea that a US recession is not far off is not nonsense at all. The ISM manufacturing index in America has fallen to 48.2. That suggests, as Capital Economics puts it, that the "manufacturing sector is dangerously close to recession". That matters largely because of the implications it has for the ongoing global currency wars.
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