The soft data — regional Fed manufacturing surveys (Empire State, Philadelphia, Dallas) with their prices-paid components, and the Chicago Fed's national activity index. Surveys arrive weeks before the hard data and catch turning points first, at the cost of false alarms.
The prices-paid components are the inflation early-warning inside these surveys — factory input costs show up here before the PPI and long before the CPI. Read them against the hard-activity page: agreement is signal, divergence is noise until proven otherwise.
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