Latest / Markets with Megan: A Quick Financial Markets Update / It's Not All Bad! ISM Report | S2 028 | 04-03-25

Transcript

It's Not All Bad! ISM Report | S2 028 | 04-03-25 · Markets with Megan: A Quick Financial Markets Update

• 0:02
  Megan Horneman: Well, the service sector took a hit as we rounded out the first quarter of 2025.
• 0:06
  Megan Horneman: This is Markets with Megan, and it's Thursday, april the 3rd.
• 0:09
  Megan Horneman: We're here today to talk about the ISM services report that we received this morning.
• 0:15
  Megan Horneman: And why do we focus on this report?
• 0:17
  Megan Horneman: Because services is where we, as Americans, spend the majority of our money, so this always tends to be a market mover, and what we're seeing is that the index came in weaker than expected in March and it's teetering on that level where we consider between expansion and contraction, which is a level of 50.
• 0:34
  Megan Horneman: And the index came in at 50.8.
• 0:36
  Megan Horneman: So let's dig through some of the details that we got in this report, because it's not all that bad.
• 0:41
  Megan Horneman: First of all, the prices pay component took a pretty big dip lower.
• 0:45
  Megan Horneman: That's good.
• 0:46
  Megan Horneman: It needs to come down.
• 0:47
  Megan Horneman: This was a measure of sticky inflation, so it still is way too high for the Federal Reserve to like, but it is coming down.
• 0:56
  Megan Horneman: We also saw big declines in employment, so that was where we also had some of the tightness in the labor market and we've said we need to have some of this adjust in order to really tackle inflation for the long term.
• 1:09
  Megan Horneman: We also saw weakness in.
• 1:11
  Megan Horneman: Whether you look at new orders, the backlog of orders, these things drag the index down.
• 1:16
  Megan Horneman: This is a March report.
• 1:21
  Megan Horneman: I don't think markets are really focusing on that today.
• 1:24
  Megan Horneman: This is all about tariffs.
• 1:26
  Megan Horneman: But if we were to take tariffs out of the equation, this is telling us that inflation, the service sector we may be getting some relief from that, and then also we're getting some of the employment side now starting to filter into the services.
• 1:39
  Megan Horneman: That's all we have today.
• 1:41
  Megan Horneman: If you like this podcast, please subscribe, hit that alarm bell, share with friends, family or colleagues and, as always, if you want a history of our podcast, you can go to marketswithmegan.
• 1:48
  Megan Horneman: fm.
• 1:50
  Megan Horneman: Thank you,