US Construction Spending & Manufacturing Employment YoY % Change

Usage Notes: Timeframe: Use a monthly chart, as TTLCONS and MANEMP are monthly data. Other timeframes result in interpolation.
Data Availability: As of October 2025, TTLCONS is available until July 2025 and MANEMP until August 2025 (automatically via TradingView).

The Unsung Heroes: Why C&M Are the True Indicators
Imagine the economy is a highly sensitive vehicle. Quarterly reported GDP is like a quarterly glance at the odometer—it's slow, often delayed, and clearly refers to the past. Anyone who wants to predict future developments needs something much faster.

This is where construction and manufacturing come into play. These two sectors are the machine builders of the economy and provide us with real-time feedback. They form the backbone of economic forecasting for several important reasons:

1. Monetary policy indicators: Both sectors are highly sensitive to monetary policy developments, such as interest rate changes. If developers are unable to finance large residential or commercial projects and manufacturers postpone capital-intensive factory expansions, for example, declines in construction demand would quickly affect other sectors.

2. The backbone of the secondary sector: These industries constitute the secondary sector of the economy, meaning they are concerned with the actual transformation and production of goods, not just the extraction of raw materials or the provision of intangible services. One could argue that while they only account for about 15% of GDP in the US, their impact is massive and cyclical.

3. The timeliness advantage: Forget quarterly lags. Both construction output and manufacturing employment data are released monthly. This timely, frequent data allows analysts to assess economic momentum much more quickly than if they had to wait for delayed GDP reports.

In the US, some analysts have even titled their articles with the bold claim: "Housing construction is the business cycle." Fluctuations in housing construction are frequent and large, and a decline in activity is almost always accompanied by a subsequent decline in GDP.