The prices increased further by 4.5 to 82.1 because of the rising higher freight costs (about $6000 per container). This also impacted the supplier’s deliveries by +0.5 to 68.2 as a higher number indicated slower deliveries.
http://sg-stock.blogspot.com/2021/01/the-us-inflation-is-coming-part-5.html
The producers failed to ramp up their production (60.7, -4) further because of the longer deliveries time but employment increased (52.6, +0.9) to prepare for a rebound in the customers’ inventories (33.1, -4.8) which was too low because the inventories continued to be depleted. However, the new order (61.1, -6.4) declined due to lower export and local orders. This could be seen in the monthly US retail sales figure below.
All these resulted in the PMI decreasing to 58.7 (-1.8). This means that the US economy will still continue to improve unless there is another major lockdown due to the new covid variant.
