by Lee Adler
Wall Street Examiner
If the US economy is growing, then why are industrial production and electric power generation both on downward paths?
The Fed’s Industrial Production Indexes are always interesting because they measure units of production. There’s no price inflation in the data, therefore no need to adjust for it using the government’s questionable inflation data. The Industrial Production (IP) data shows the actual volume of units of production for the US’s mines, factories, and utilities, both as a whole, and by individual industries.
While the IP data doesn’t measure services industries directly, the nation’s utilities serve not only other industrial users, but also all service industries and virtually all households in the US.