Manufacturing Purchasing Manager Indices (PMIs) are considered to be the leading and most important economic indicators.
December 2013 Update
The winners in the manufacturing PMI readings since our last update in August were the Eurozone led by Germany. They managed to reduce the distance to the U.S. Thanks to the weak yen, the Japanese PMI remained one of the strongest. All Emerging Markets still struggle with hawkish central banks, high wage increases and reduced availability of foreign funding.
Via the FT comes this heatmap of global manufacturing PMIs from HSBC:
See on the next page the data until August 2013 , on page 3 and the following ones a long-term overview
See more for