Industrial Production - The Haves And Have Nots

With the disappointing May industrial production numbers for Italy (-1.2% MoM) and France (-1.7% MoM) out today, we thought we would try and place them in a simple historical and global context. In the charts below, we are looking at industrial production of major developed countries around the world across various time perspectives. We are indexing the the level of production at 100 at whatever the starting point of the chart is so that each series is on equal footing as much as possible (granted every country has different data methodologies). The themes across different time slices are all basically the same: 1) Australia, Canada, and the US have all grown production nicely over the long-run and since the Great Recession 2) Germany, especially in the last decade, has separated itself from the rest of Europe 3) UK, France and Italy have not recovered from the Great Recession from a production standpoint and are below 1990 levels 4) Japan has bounced back from the Great Recession but not from the excesses built up in the 1980s.