NY Empire State Index

"Some folks like to get away, take a holiday from the neighborhood..."

Dateline: 1998. Bone Thugs-N-Harmony told us to wake up and get up because it’s the 1st of tha month. Why so excited for the first day of a new month? Because that’s when the Empire State Manufacturing Survey is sent to 200 top manufacturing execs all around the state of New York.

The responses to this survey make up the “NY Empire State Index,” which basically tells us what business conditions are like in the nation’s fourth most populous state. If the index is above zero, that means that respondents are feeling good about business conditions; if it’s below zero, they’re not. This index tends to be a pretty good indicator of confidence in the manufacturing sector as a whole, so people tend to sit up and take notice whenever trends in the index start changing.