Paul Smith

speaker

84 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 18 Jul

Paul Smith’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

The Decisive Podcast: Insights and analysis to empower confident decision-making. · PMI in Focus: High Frequency Signals for an Uncertain Business Environment · 18 Jul 2026 podcast

Hello and a warm welcome to the latest episode of the Decisive Podcast.

I'm Paul Smith, an economist with S ⁇ P Global Market Intelligence, and today I'm here to chair a discussion around the latest trends and developments in our global purchasing managers indices.

Now, the last time we were on the decisive podcast back in May, we discussed some April PMI data and we noted several important developments, largely along the following lines, and largely, of course, linked to the recent crisis that began in the Middle East.

We found evidence of stockpiling amongst manufacturers and their clients, largely to protect against supply chain disruption and price increasing.

Increases that had emanated from that, the start of that Middle East crisis.

And we felt the net impact was that this kind of stockpiling was actually pinning some industrial growth.

Now, the opposite kind of effect to that was in the service sector.

We felt the Middle East crisis was leading to some kind of hesitancy and uncertainty in terms of kind of client activity and

And broader kind of economic output and was affecting the performance of the service sector.

And we felt altogether that was adding up to what we felt was a kind of noticeable risk of stagflationary environment developing.

That is, there was little change overall in economic output, maybe a kind of downside risk to a contraction in economic output, but at the same time elevated inflation.

Now, as I said, of course, underpinning a lot of these trends was the crisis in the Middle East and in terms of the global economy, the affected blockade of a crucial maritime shipping route that has been the Strait of Hamooz.

Now, I thought today it would be great to get an update on some of these themes and some other drivers of current economic trends.

And I'm joined by two senior economists from our team to discuss this.

So, first of

We've got our regular contributor, Andrew Harker.

Yep, that's great.

And secondly, we also have my namesake, Phil Smith, joining us on the podcast.

we tend to do sometimes I think recent months, haven't they?

Kind of these changes in stockpiling, the uncertainty, the price dynamics.

Showing 1–20 of 84 · page 1 of 5