Yes, it looks like metal production in the US took a hit last year.

I backed up after the last post and tried to get a broader view of things.

First, take a second look at metals, this time at the broader industry — primary and fabricated metal products, collectively. The US lost around 180 firms in 2016, a drop of around one-third of 1 percent. But the concomitant drop in relevant employment was larger, a fall of 58,000 workers, down 3 percent.

These are estimates taken from the quarterly employment census, but the latter is still a big number.

Then look at output from those sectors. It helps to look quarter-by-quarter*. Metals production (again, primary and secondary metals production combined) started falling in the middle of 2015 and didn’t really begin to recover until this year. The value of that production in 2016 was 9 percent below the same time period two years prior, and that’s before adjusting for general or industry-specific inflation.

This is data estimated by the US Bureau of Economic Analysis. (The employment data in the first graph comes from a different data set via a separate agency, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.)

So we’ll see what the industry analysts say was happening in 2015 and much of 2016. But someone’s got some explaining to do.

• These are annualized figures reported on a quarterly basis.