Personal Incomes, less Transfer Payments and deflated by Personal Consumption Expenditures, is used as one of the four co-incident components of the NBER Recession Model. There was a huge jump in this indicator for the months of November and December 2012 quite possibly as a result of incomes being pulled forward as a result of the Fiscal Cliff taxes uncertainty. According to the BEA, “Personal income in November and December was boosted by accelerated and special dividend payments to persons and by […]
About RecessionALERT
Dwaine has a Bachelor of Science (BSc Hons) university degree majoring in computer science, math & statistics and is a full-time trader and investor. His passion for numbers and keen research & analytic ability has helped grow RecessionALERT into a company used by hundreds of hedge funds, brokerage firms and financial advisers around the world.Estimating recession probabilities using Gross Domestic Product & Income
” The NBER does not define a recession in terms of two consecutive quarters of decline in real GDP. Rather, a recession is a significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months, normally visible in real GDP, real income, employment, industrial production, and wholesale-retail sales.” – https://www.nber.org Every month, we track the last 4 monthly items mentioned above in our “NBER Coincident Recession Model” which we publish for subscribers. These are affectionately known as […]
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Coincident data not playing nice with the bears
Over the last two months we had Real Retail Sales, Industrial Production, Personal Incomes and Non-Farm payrolls all pushing new expansion highs. The only data not in for December now is Real Incomes. In addition we have noted upward revisions as opposed to the downward revisions promised by the recession-is-here camp. With neither leading nor co-incident data to lean on in support of a recession call, options are getting slim in defense of a recession that is supposedly in its […]
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Structural distortions hazardous to recession forecasting
Very few people realise just how close we came to a recession in the past 12 months, purely on an economic indicators perspective and not counting external risks such as the Fiscal Cliff debate. However, many traditional long leading indicators based on for example the yield curve and the unemployment rate, belie just how close a shave we had. This is because of deep structural changes and/or distortions brought about by the Great Recession of 2008. As it is, most […]
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Launch of new Recession Analytics Tool
We are pleased to announce the revamp of our historical time-series data file, which is published quarterly, with the following new additions: Addition of Labor Market Index historical data Addition of Long Leading Index historical data Addition of RAVI historical data for 1/2/3/5/10 year forecasts New analytic tool & charting visualisations RFE+ which is index showing number of 12 models flagging recession The first two items are self-explanatory and you can read about them and look at their sample reports on the […]
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100% Recession risks – a follow on
Professor Piger updated his recession probability model that caused so much attention early November (See “Debunking 100% probability of recession“). As we forecast last month, the probability index undertook a “revision” of epic proportions as displayed below (01-Dec-12 vintage): This is a classic real-world rendition as to why you cannot make “never before has recession probability reached 20% without a recession ensuing shortly after ” type inferences with these Markov model readings, and why the developers of the model use […]
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On the cliff’s edge
Industrial Production was slowed by hurricane Sandy and its growth rate is now in recession territory. Bear in mind, for our “NBER Recession Model of last resort” we use a much faster smoothed growth here than the standard 12-month rate of change and therefore many other studies you observe on Industrial production may not be in recession territory yet. We have found the faster growth rate window deployed by our model to work the best for our composite model though. A recession signal from Industrial production […]
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Debunking 100% probabilities of recession calls
The latest buzz on the internet is a FRED chart published by the Federal Reserve of St. Louis of Chauvet and Piger’s dynamic factor Markov recession probability index. Its currently jumped from less than 1% to 18%. Inferences are being made that recessions have always been underway or occurred very shortly after a reading of 18%. Suddenly the 18% probability went to 100% based on this inference. Why this inference is so ludicrous is also aptly described on Jeff Millers’ […]
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On the brink of Global Recession
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 dotted line) that the odds of global recession are very high. The blue lines show NBER recessions for the U.S and we see that whilst […]
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Retail sales data not supportive of recession
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 real-time observed 12-month growth rates. This is shown below where we compare the growth rate of a series that only looks at real-time published data […]
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Effects of Revisions on Recession Forecasting
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 far smaller revisions than a broader time series such as GDP which is known to encounter very large revisions. Each instance of an update or […]
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50 State Co-incident update : No Recession
A while back we published an interesting project (Predicting US Recessions with State co-incident data) to see if we could get some advance recession warning from the co-incident indices of the 50 US states. We built a composite economic index of 50 U.S states as published by the Philadelphia Federal Reserve, combined in a positively-weighted index (CEI) that is statistically regressed with NBER & 3-months prior dates (hence the “leading” characteristics of the composite.) It aims to give 3 months […]
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CFNAI- revisions and recessions
The latest CFNAI-MA3 reading came in at -0.47 from last weeks -0.26 (revised down from -0.21). This downward jump (and downward revision) naturally has everyone on edge. We are not yet concerned with this reading as it is not being corroborated by any leading indicators. However with the perma-bears now being forced to hang their hats onto the “revisions” coat-hook recently, this reading appears uncomfortably close to the -0.7 recession trigger for those spooked by the perma-bears’ gloomy predictions. We looked […]
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Judging Recession Forecasting Accuracy
In August 2011, ECRI declared a recession was upon us. If you spend enough time examining their initial proclamations it was literally that a recession was imminent, saying “It’s either just begun, or it’s right in front of us.” Subsequently they revised their call, saying the recession would hit “by mid year” 2012. At that time an array of proprietary leading indicators were in contagion. Hussman and others followed suit with bearish outlooks. In January 2012 we said we couldn’t see it. The general response from the […]
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The NBER co-incident Recession Model – “confirmation of last resort”
NOTE : AFTER READING THIS, ALSO TAKE A LOOK AT : “The effect of data revisions on the NBER recession model” and “Estimating Recession Probabilities using GDP/GDI” The National Buro for Economic Research (NBER) are the final arbiters of recession dating in the U.S. They take forever to proclaim specific starts and ends to expansions so all the revisions can “work their way through” and they can be dead accurate. Given these proclamation lags can take up to 12 months, their […]
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Recession Forecasting Ensemble (RFE-6) & market timing
The Recession Forecasting Ensemble (RFE) is a collection of 6 powerful diversified recession forecasting methodologies that differ in data, mechanics, approach and theory to offer us an over-arching recession dating and forecasting methodology that is resilient to individual “model risk”. There is no “one size fits all” mathematical model that performs well in the past and is guaranteed to perform well into the future. Every recession is different and since recession calls are “high stakes” events, with costly consequences for either calling […]
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Here we go again…
WE DON’T SEE IMMINENT RECESSION & NEITHER SHOULD THE NBER We find ourselves in the 3rd “summer slowdown scare”, just like 2010 and in August 2011. During this time the perma-bears crank up the alarm bells and we are bombarded with a cacophony of ill tidings that spell the doom of the U.S economy. As we saw in 2010 and 2011 the economic slowdowns turned out to be “soft landings”. Investors scared into the side-lines stared in disbelief as the […]
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The SP-500 Great Trough Detector Project
The SP-500 Great Trough Project is a technique where we deploy market breadth to determine favorable points in time for investors to “buy on the dips” on the U.S stock markets, more specifically the SP-500. We make reference to a “Great Trough” as rare, large correction reversals on the SP-500, normally spawning a new bull-market leg, or at least a multi-month gain. There have been 40 Great trough signals since 1987 or roughly 1.6 signals per year or one per 7.5 months. NOTE : THIS […]
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On standby for a Great Trough
13 June 2012 UPDATE: This Great Trough is not done yet, we may well re-test prior lows in the bottom-making process. The breadth- index head-faked and fell below 26% yesterday meaning the countdown timer will be reset. We now await for the index to rise above 26 again and attempt a second strike through 87 within 15 trading days. We then issue the BUY signal. For a detailed background, mechanics and statistics of this system read The Great Trough Detector Project on our RESEARCH […]
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Can the U.S skirt global recession?
With many parts of the Euro-zone entering or already in recession, and the OECD recently putting Australia, Germany and Italy into recession, one has to wonder if the feeble U.S recovery can skirt a global recession. Many mainstream pundits have been pointing to countries around the globe slipping into recession as a reason why a U.S recession in the near future is a done deal. But this is not necessarily the case. The chart below shows which percentage of the 39 OECD countries across the world have their […]
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