October | 2012 | RecessionAlert

Archive | October, 2012

On the brink of Global Recession

By RecessionALERT on October 31, 2012 in Reflections

The Global Economy is on the brink of a recession with 58% of 29 OECD countries experiencing business cycle contractions. The chart below shows OECD defined global contractions (grey shaded areas) together with the percentage of 29 OECD member countries experiencing slowdowns. It is evident that whenever 50% or more of countries enter contraction (red […]

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Retail sales data not supportive of recession

By RecessionALERT on October 16, 2012 in Reflections

The September RETAIL SALES component (RSAFS) of the NBER Recession Model was in today. It surprised to the upside as well as had an upward revision on the prior month. For the most part, this series has been revised downwards over time of late, but this does not necessarily equate to downward revisions to the […]

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Effects of Revisions on Recession Forecasting

By RecessionALERT on October 5, 2012 in Research Papers

Economic time series used in measuring business cycles and forecasting recessions are subject to revisions and re-benchmarking. Over time, more up-to-date and accurate data become available and time series are revised to reflect the updates. Some economic time series are subject to more drastic revisions than others. For example, the unemployment rate is subject to […]

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IMPORTANT DISCLAIMERS: Although many of our models rely heavily on back-testing, optimisation and probability methods, please note that past performance is NO GUARANTEE for future returns. No system devised by man can predict the future, let alone the future of the markets and economies. What we have are sets of mathematical models that use historical data and varying theories to pinpoint places in time when the STATISTICAL LIKELYHOOD of calling the start and end to recessions is the greatest. In the midst of all the best mathematical models, you can have geo-political events, wars, terrorist attacks, natural disasters and even nuclear accidents that tip everything upside down. This is always a risk factor you need to factor in on any recession call no matter how confident you are in a signal. The SuperIndexes are created through mathematical and statistical optimisation techniques that best fit the historical NBER data. There is no guarantee that out-of-sample performance will match that of prior in-sample performance.