U.S. manufacturing and trade inventories rose by 0.7 percent in September to a seasonally adjusted $1.612 trillion, the U.S. Census Bureau said Wednesday. The report showed manufacturing and trade sales rose 1.4 percent on a seasonally adjusted basis to $1.26 trillion. From July 2011, inventories rose by 6.2 percent while sales rose 4.4 percent from a year earlier. The inventory-to-sales ratio -- reflecting how many months it would take a company to deplete its inventory at the current sales pace -- came in at 1.28, slightly higher than a year earlier, when the ratio was 1.25.