Industrial production, the Federal Reserve’s measure of the US manfacturing sector, disappointed in the beginning of 2017.
Industrial production fell by 0.3% in January. Economists had been expecting production to tick up by 0.1%.
The previous month saw production rise by 0.6%.
Additionally, the capacity utilization rate, or the percentage of production capacity being used in the US, fell slightly to 75.3%, from the prior month’s reading of 75.6%.
The capacity utilization rate is 4.6 percentage points below its long-run (1972-2016) average.