Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen recently used her “jobs data dashboard” to justify the Fed’s easy money policies and to argue there’s still considerable slack in the labor market five years after the recession’s end. Seven of the nine gauges on this dashboard have not recovered to levels reached before the last recession, reinforcing her belief […]
Archive | Reflections RSS feed for this section
U.S future economic outlook improves
The RecessionALERT monthly U.S Leading Growth Index (USMLI) is an index that attempts to capture future (6-9 months) U.S economic growth. The index has been constructed since 1960, but this report only displays data from 2000 onwards to capture the last two recessions. The USMLI consist of 10 sub-components that are in turn constructed from over […]
Read full story · Comments are closed
Seasonality approaching its worst point
We have entered the Mid-Term cycle in the Quadrennial Presidential Cycle, in which the months April through to September typically represent the worst SP-500 seasonal period for the entire 4 year cycle. The current cycle which commenced in 2012 has performed way above average so far, as shown below with the black dotted line: However […]
Read full story · Comments are closed
FED in the driving seat
The chart below shows how the FED is firmly in the driving seat for the U.S stock markets through the monthly growth of their balance sheet, primarily through the purchase of U.S Treasuries and Mortgage Backed Securities. You can clearly see why talk of tapering sends shudders down everyone’s spine: It is interesting to note […]
Read full story · Comments are closed
Labor Market flags U.S Recession on horizon
Labor data last week surprised to the upside and pointed to an improvement in hiring and by implication the labor market. However, our leading Labor Market Growth Index, which tracks various diversified aspects of the general U.S labor market, experienced a sharp drop for the data representing the end of October 2013, to below the […]
Read full story · Comments are closed
Things could get fun from here…
At last, a decent pullback with a fat red candle on the SP-500. If the premise (see “Seven Paw-prints of the Bear“) is that we are in a well established bull market (we don’t care if its liquidity or economically fueled) then this could become a desperately needed “buy on the dip” opportunity to get aboard […]
Read full story · Comments are closed
Market Update 17/10/13 [PUBLIC]
The political standoff associated with the debt ceiling and government shutdown has made its impact felt the last 3 weeks on the weekly leading data. Two out of the 5 main components of the WLInr are now firmly planted in recession warning territory with some 30% of all underlying 50 weekly time series also camped […]
Read full story · Comments are closed
Market Timing Strategies – putting it all together
We offer a number of timing strategies for the SP-500 as described below: 1.Long-term investment models These are primarily focused on funds-grade long-term investing models such as the Recession Forecasting Ensemble (RFE) and the Composite Market Health Index (CMHI). These are high confidence, infrequent traders. They attempt to capture as much upside of the market […]
Read full story · Comments are closed
Market Update 11/07/2013
The SuperIndex has jumped smartly this week from mostly positive data from eLEI and the ISM report. However growth in ETI, GDP and Initial claims has slowed. A few months back on this radio interview we forecast there would be no “Summer Swoon” for the monthly leading data as with the three prior summers. With […]
Read full story · Comments are closed
Don’t count on FED tapering any time soon
Whilst the market has sold off in the expectation of FED tapering in the face of an improving economy, and co-incident economic data continues to show improvement, the leading data is likely to do otherwise in the coming months. This means that after an initial improvement of short duration the pressure will again be back […]
Read full story · Comments are closed
World Recession Update – May 2013
We have first quarter 2013 GDP data for about 53% of the OECD countries list. The full World Economy Report is available from the MEMBERS downloads section in the WORLD REPORT tab. There are a number of interesting observations we can make this month. The first is that whilst the percentage of economies experiencing a […]
Read full story · Comments are closed
Atypical Global Recovery underway
Since we last reported on the current Global Recession, the Global Leading Economic Indicator (GLEI) rose for the month of March, but is following an atypical growth pattern coming out of recession, with a slope far shallower than the normal expected rebound. Also noteworthy this month is that the percentage of countries with rising LEI’s […]
Read full story · Comments are closed
World Recession Update – Apr 2013
EXTERNAL PUBLISHERS PLEASE NOTE : You may republish up to and including the first 3 charts of this report (encompassing 65% of the report) and link to this page for your readers to complete the rest of the article. The following charts and text are an extraction from our monthly Global Recession Report, one of […]
Read full story · Comments are closed
Fragile global bottoming or double-dip in progress?
Our prior post titled “World Recession Update” depicted the percentage of 41 countries tracked around the globe that were printing 1 or 2 consecutive negative quarters of GDP growth. It is easy to view the data presented and come to the alarming conclusion the world is accelerating into an ever-deepening recession and the U.S is […]
Read full story · Comments are closed
World Recession Update
We have quarterly GDP data for 11 more OECD countries since our last post “World plunges into recession in Q42012“, and there have been some 2nd estimate revisions (such as the U.S). The chart below shows an improvement over the last post we made with the inclusion of more data points, but both the measures […]
Read full story · Comments are closed
World plunges into recession in Q42012
With the disappointing initial GDP releases for Q42012 from Europe out, the “world” as defined by 41 OECD countries across the globe, has plunged into recession. We define “recession” through two alternative definitions for our comparison, either the presence of a single negative quarter-on-quarter growth or the more traditional two consecutive negative quarterly growths. Whichever way you look at it, the […]
Read full story · Comments are closed
Personal Incomes to decline sharply for January
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 […]
Read full story · Comments are closed
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 […]
Read full story · Comments are closed
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 […]
Read full story · Comments are closed
World Economy Update – as at July 2013
These are extracts compiled from our monthly World Economy Report that comes standard with a RecessionALERT annual subscription: It does not matter which way you look at it – the global economy has rebounded into growth territory from which surely could have been classified as a World Recession a few quarters ago. We can see […]