U.S. economic growth picked up pace in November as production improved, data from the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago showed Tuesday.
The Chicago Fed National Activity Index rose to 0.03 in November, improving from a revised minus 0.66 in October, with the majority of indicators marking improvement. The reading below zero suggests economic activity is expanding at a slightly slower rate than its average historical trend.
The CFNAI index, designed to gauge overall economic activity and inflationary pressures, is composed of 85 economic indicators from four broad categories of data: production and income; employment, unemployment and hours; personal consumption and housing; and sales, orders and inventories.
Of the four, industrial production increased 0.2 percent in November after decreasing 0.9 percent in October. The contribution of the sales, orders and inventories category also moved up to minus 0.03 from minus 0.11 in the previous month.
The CFNAI diffusion index – which captures how much the change in the monthly index is spread among the 85 indicators over three months – increased to minus 0.21 in November from minus 0.35 last month. The index’s headline three-month moving average also moved up to minus 0.20 from minus 0.26 in October.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen previously told the Wall Street Journal that the U.S. economy is on the path toward taming inflation without a deep economic slowdown, achieving a so-called soft-landing.