Today has featured the EU's major monthly set of confidence indicators, aggregating to their growth-tracking Economic Sentiment index. It's recovery continues, but it's only partial - indeed, it's still 15.2% below pre-Covid levels. And that's the sort of frailty which confidence indexes around the world are showing, even though they (mostly) continue to improve.
Just about the only place confidence has recovered beyond pre-Covid levels is in financial markets, with State Street's global investor confidence index now roughly 10% above pre-Covid levels.
The second strand in today's bulletin is the continuing efforts being made to rebuild US inventories, after the huge inventory dump of the first half of the year. Progress isn't easy, and in some cases, shortage of materials is now closing production lines. What we're seeing in this part of the inventory cycle is combined supply and demand shocks.
