by Wolf Richter
Wolf Street
Economic powerhouse Texas first got hit by the Oil Bust then by the Coronavirus. Expect similar confluence of unrelated factors in other regions.
Most of the economic data is released weeks and months after the fact. But surveys of manufacturing and service companies foreshadow what will happen with the official data when it finally appears.
The Texas manufacturing production index, for which data was collected between March 17 to 25 from 110 Texas-based unnamed manufacturers, plunged from +16.4 in February to -35.3 in March, the largest month-to-month drop in the history of the index going back to 2004, the Dallas Fed reported this morning: