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Archive | January, 2012

Further Improving the Use of the ECRI WLI (Part-II)

By RecessionALERT on January 20, 2012 in Research Papers

This article was co-authored with Georg Vrba and first appeared on the popular Advisor Perspectives web site on 17 January 2012 In our last article on using the ECRI WLI, we described how best to use the growth figure of the Economic Cycle Research Institute’s Weekly Leading Index (WLI) to predict recessions, but we also highlighted an impediment to our research –an inability of outsiders to replicate the index (and thus know its components) and its “growth figure” which ECRI publishes […]

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Using the ECRI WLI to Flag Recessions (Part-I)

By RecessionALERT on January 10, 2012 in Research Papers

In September 2011, the Economic Cycle Research Institute proclaimed a new U.S recession would begin sometime in the coming year. ECRI based its prediction on a host of its own internal long-leading indexes, together with its widely followed weekly leading index (WLI). I do not wish to debate the merits of ECRI’s recession call here (I wrote on this topic last week), but since the ECRI WLI is so widely followed – presumably because it is free to the public […]

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