Today’s not-much-noticed Industrial Production data release showed that January’s Industrial Production was up a bit from December. This report also indicated that capacity utilization increased a bit in January from December. Notice, charts below, capacity utilization and industrial production have been improving for 6 months now. This is enough to indicate a trend, indicating that manufacturing and related sectors are slowly coming to back to life. The levels of these indicators are still low within a longer historical perspective; see the longer Industrial Production chart below. At the current rate of improvement, we might get to healthier levels by midyear.