More bad news for the manufacturing crisis

Labour, Greens, NZ First and Mana recently concluded their inquiry into the “manufacturing crisis”. Sadly for them the manufacturing sector is at near record confidence levels with the July PMI Index at the highest level since is started in 2002, for the month of July.

The BNZ states:

The BNZ-BusinessNZ seasonally adjusted PMI for July stood at 59.5, which was 4.3 points higher than June and a return to strong levels of expansion seen in May. Compared with previous July results, the 2013 value was the highest since the survey began in 2002, and the third highest monthly result on record.

And this part was fascinating:

The very robust level of the PMI overall goes to show the strength of the positives (domestic and possibly elsewhere offshore) outweighing the slowdown in Australia and associated NZD/AUD strength. This is not a complete surprise. After all, domestic manufacturing sales are about a quarter bigger than manufacturing export sales.

This is not to say some are hurting from the stronger NZD/AUD, but rather on balance economic positives are outweighing the negatives and increasingly so. Indeed, it is the economic positives in NZ’s favour that are behind the currency’s strength in the first place.

PMI’s illustrate the relative story. In comparison to NZ’s stunning 59.5 July PMI reading, the equivalent Australian series sits at a miserable 42.0. In fact, NZ continues to sit atop the PMI leaderboard of usual comparator countries.

This is what David, Russell, Winston and Hone call a crisis.