It may be hard to get excited about an August economic report a day after the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) and Janet Yellen decided to hold interest rates at zero. That being said, investors and economists are now looking at whatever data they can find to debate whether a rate hike will come in October or December FOMC meetings.

The Conference Board has released its Leading Economic Index for the month of August, showing a gain of 0.1% to 123.7. The Bloomberg consensus estimate was for a 0.2% gain, so let’s just call this difference a rounding error. For a comparison, the leading indicators were unchanged in July and were up by 0.6% in the month of June.

As 24/7 Wall St. has noted on many occasions, the “leading” aspect of leading economic indicators is not so leading. It is always two weeks in arrears, and most of the economic components inside the report are known ahead of time, so economists are very rarely that far off of consensus.

Individual components were as follows:

• Coincident Economic Index increased 0.1% to 112.6, following a 0.4% increase in July and a 0.1% increase in June.
• Lagging Economic Index rose 0.2% to 118.5, following a 0.3% increase in July and a 0.9% increase in June.

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Friday’s announcement from the Conference Board said:

The U.S. LEI suggests economic growth will remain moderate into the New Year, with little reason to expect growth to pick up substantially. Average working hours and new orders in manufacturing have been weak, pointing to more slow growth in the industrial sector. However, employment, personal income and manufacturing and trade sales have all been rising, helping to offset the weakness in industrial production in recent months.

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