The Federal Reserve Board reported that industrial production increased by 0.6 percent in December. This would ordinarily be good news, except that a closer examination showed that manufacturing output actually shrank slightly for the month.The December increase was driven almost entirely by a 5.9 percent jump in output at utilities. This tells us about the weather across the country in December, but it doesn’t tell us much about the state of the economy.

–Dean Baker

Dean Baker is senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C. He is the author of several books, including Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer. Read more about Dean.