US Dallas Fed Services Revenues Index (Jul) 9.5 (Prev. 9.8)

The Dallas Fed services survey sits in the second tier of US regional activity data, well behind the ISM and the national PMIs in the pecking order, and prints of this size rarely move rates or the dollar on their own. A marginal downtick of this kind, essentially flat against the prior reading, fits the pattern of noise rather than signal; regional Fed surveys have historically mattered mainly when they cluster in the same direction ahead of the national surveys, at which point they feed into ISM expectations. The distinction worth drawing is between revenue measures and the employment and wage subcomponents, since it is the labour and prices-paid details in these surveys that have tended to catch attention when the Fed is focused on services inflation stickiness. The follow-ons are the other regional services prints and the ISM services release, where a run of soft regional readings has in past episodes prefigured the national number. Taken alone, the print is a rounding error in the data calendar.