The Institute for Supply Management posts its April manufacturing PMI at 10 a.m. ET Friday, with consensus at roughly 52.0-52.5 versus the March 52.7 reading that marked an eighteenth straight month of expansion under the new survey's accounting. [1][2] The release lands on the same broadcast as China's overnight RatingDog manufacturing PMI of 52.2, the country's fastest expansion since December 2020 and a beat to the 51 expected. [3][4]

The paper's Friday brief on the China print treats the export-orders subindex as the operating artifact two weeks before the Beijing summit. [3] What today's ISM read does is locate the American counterparty on the same tape: if the US print holds in the low 52s while China prints 52.2, the trade-data divergence narrows precisely as Trump and Xi prepare to meet on May 14. [4][5]

The structural reading: factory activity on both sides of the Pacific is expanding at the moment a $126 Brent print is feeding through to industrial input costs. ISM survey chair Susan Spence flagged in March that demand indicators were "going in the wrong direction"; the April print is the first chance to test whether the warning has bitten. [2] The Friday tape is not two unrelated releases. It is one trade-data screen with a summit two Wednesdays out.

-- DAVID CHEN, Beijing