” 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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

The traditional method for recession forecasting is to find an economic indicator or composite index that has a high correlation and adequately responds in advance to economic expansion or contraction. One then de-trends this indicator by taking a growth rate (straight or smoothed) over x-months and plotting that on a chart. When this growth rate (also called the first derivative) falls below a specific threshold you call recession. The value used for x depends on many factors but is normally […]