The “quick and dirty” forecasting method has been flawless

 

 - by New Deal democrat

On Friday I wrote about how I have been rethinking the long leading indicators — those that are useful for forecasting the economy 12-24 months out — because while when they are positive, the economy has been as well, but when they have been negative (twice) in the past 15 years, the economy has weakened but not gone into recession. They have functioned more like a “severe weather watch;” i.e., conditions are favorable for development, but by no means more likely than not.

By contrast, the “quick and dirty” short term forecasting system has been flawless.

What is the “quick and dirty” system? Simply look at the stock market and the four week average of initial jobless claims. If the stock market is lower YoY, and the four week moving average of new jobless claims is 10% or more higher YoY, the economy is likely to fall into recession in the next several months. Otherwise, the economy will remain in expansion.

Let’s take a look. The below two graphs track stock prices (gold), the four week average of initial jobless claims (red, inverted and adding 10 so that any YoY change of higher than 10% shows below the zero line); and also adds real retail sales YoY (blue), which has also had a very good long term record; first for the four years before the pandemic:

And here are the five years after the pandemic:

As you can easily see, at no time have both stock prices and the four week average of initial jobless claims been below the zero line together. In 2018, stock prices and real retail sales were negative for only one month, but jobless claims were doing very well. And in mid-2023, the system never quite signaled — stock prices went positive YoY one month before jobless claims turned sufficiently negative. And real retail sales likewise turned positive with stock prices.

Currently all three metrics are solidly positive, signaling economic expansion will continue for at least the next few months.

And what of the pandemic? Here is the close-up of 2020:

The pandemic lockdowns began roughly on March 9. Within several days, the stock market turned negative YoY, and jobless claims also did so by more than 10% on March 21 (in fact, there were such severe layoffs that I’ve had to cut the scale by 100!). By early May the stock market had turned positive again. Real retail sales also turned negative in March, and turned back positive in June.

LIke I said: quick and dirty - and flawless.

Weekly Indicators for June 15 - 19 at Seeking Alpha

 

 - by New Deal democrat

My “Weekly Indicators” post is up at Seeking Alpha.

There was another air pocket this week in withholding tax payments, and some weakening in mortgage applications, but the overall tone remains positive, despite the ongoing international chaos emanating from Washington.

As usual, clicking over and reading will bring you up to the virtual moment as to the state of the economy, and help me with my lunch money.

Rethinking the long leading indicators

 - by New Deal democrat

I’ve been writing about the economy, and employing forecasting models, for over 20 years. For the entire duration of the period, there have been portents of DOOOM written about by many others. I have been much more cautious, going on “Recession Watch” only twice since 2008: in 2019 and late 2022. I have never gone on “Recession Warning.” 

Which is broadly concurrent with the economy since then. Since June 2009, the economy has been in recession for only the 2 month period immediately after COVID hit and brought society to a near standstill. For the other 200+ months, it has been expanding.

We’ll never know if, absent COVID, there would have been a recession in 2020, although at the time I believed we were going to narrowly miss it. But in 2022, the broad warning signs were manifest - and yet no recession occurred anyway.

So, after 20 years, I think it’s time to examine whether the broad range of long leading indicators hold up. I make use of the 4 identified by Prof. Geoffrey Moore in the 1980s (and subequently used by ECRI), plus common measures of the yield curve, and also real retail sales per capita.

Let me start with Prof. Moore’s four components [Note: all of the below graphs use YoY% comparisons for easier viewing; although the models generally use the absolute measures]. Here are corporate bonds, corporate profits deflated by labor costs, real money supply, and housing permits, covering the periods of 1960-94, 1995-2026:

Although the data is very noisy, when we look for periods when *all 4* components were at or below 0, the only such times were roughly 1 year before the onset of each recession, plus 1966, as well as the 2019 and 2022 periods. Plus last year, as shown in this close-up

Between December 2024 and May 2025 all four were negative. Again, although we came close last year, no recession has occurred as of June 2026.

Next, let me compare corporate bond yields as above with the 10 year Treasury minus 2 year yield, calculated as the YoY change (thus, for example, if the spread declined form +0.40% to +0.20%, this shows up as a -0.20% change). Here’s the entire period from the mid-1970s to the present:

While both measures are negative before the onset of recessions - frequently reverting to positive immediately beforehand as the Fed lowers interest rates - there are a number of false positives as well, in 1984, 1994, 2016, and very much so in 2022. The message I take away from this is that interest rate changes are probative, but they give too many false positive recession signals. Meanwhile, housing measures, while also probative, focus on too narrow a slice of the economy.

So let’s turn to the broad “real world” long leading indicators, comparing corporate profits and real retail sales per capita. Here’s what they look like from 1953-2000, 2001-2019, and 2020-present:

I’m much more satisfied with this measure. The only times both measures (using a 3 month moving average for real retail sales per capita) have been simultaneously negative has been shortly before recessions have begun, with the false positive of 1966 and one quarter in 2022.

And those two misses have something in common: massive fiscal stimulus. In 1966 LBJ’s “guns and butter” budget poured massive amounts of spending into both military spending and domestic social program spending. In 2021, the COVID stimulus had led to an abrupt 15% increase in retail spending, but with an absolute lower level of employment. Profits boomed, then paused, but clearly could - and did - boom further as businesses amped up production and hired more employees as the COVID supply bottlenecks unspooled.

This is an intellectual work in progress, so there is much more to think about. But preliminarily, my takeaway is that while interest rates and real money supply are important background conditions, that is all they are. The “real world” early indicators from housing, corporate profits, and real consumer spending per capita are necessary for confirmation. And I need to take a more detailed look at fiscal conditions and price level shocks, which often seem to be precipitating elements for recessions.

Preliminary evidence that both business expansion - and widespread inflation - have continued in June

 - by New Deal democrat

 Yesterday, in addition to the retail sales report, general business sales and inventory were reported - but unfortunately only through April. Nominally, sales (red in the graph below) increased 1.2% while inventories increased 0.5%:

Here is the longer term look at total business sales and inventories:

In case it isn’t obvious from the above graph, sales turn both higher and lower before inventories, and the signature of an oncoming recession is sales having turned down while inventories are still increasing. Since sales were up through April - and would be even if we adjusted for inflation using either the PPI or CPI - that confirms that the economy was expanding - 2 months ago.

But the early indications from the New York and Philadelphia Fed manufacturing surveys are that manufacturing activity has continued to expand through June, but inflationary pressures are still elevated as well.

Here are the averages of the two manufacturing indexes for general activity (blue) and new orders (red):

Both showed expansion. To cut down on noise vs. signal, I recommend using the three month average - which for both metrics remained stable at a moderate expansionary pace.

Here are the same averages for prices paid (blue) and received (red):

Both of these continue at more widespread levels than during the pre-pandemic expansion, although not as widespread as during the immediate post-pandemic inflationary period. But perhaps most importantly, both prices paid and received continued to show widespread increases this month, indicating that the inflationary shock from the Iran war has not ended.

More evidence for the re-emergence of residual seasonality in jobless claims, but still very positive

 - by New Deal democrat

 From 2023 through midyear 2025, there was a distinct pattern of unresolved post-pandemic seasonality to jobless claims, which rose in the first half of the year, and then declined in the second half. Beginning at the end of June last year, though, there was a “change of regime in jobless claims numbers,” probably related to the collapse of immigration and/or fear in immigrant communities, resulting in significantly lower claims on a YoY basis. In the last few weeks there have been signs that the post-pandemic seasonality may be reasserting itself, so as I wrote last wek, “it will be interesting to see if the negative YoY comparisons continue, or if they fade away. If the change of regime was a one-time thing, driven mainly by immigrant worker issues, then these good YoY comparisons will fade between now and the end of July.”

To cut to the chase, the good YoY comparisons have not started to fade yet.

On a weekly basis, initial claims declined -4,000 to 226,000, while the four week moving average rose 4,000 to 223,250. With the typical one week delay, continuing claims rose 24,000 to 1.810 million. Here is the look since the beginning of 2023:

The close-up since the beginning of 2025 better shows how there has been a significant increase in claims in the past three weeks, to levels equivalent to those seen last July through December:

So the question is: do claims stabilize here, or start to decline again in July?

As usual, the YoY% comparison is more important for forecasting purposes, and so measured, initial claims were down -7.0%, the four week average down -7.8%, and continuing claims down -6.5%:

These continue to be very positive signs for the economy.

We’re far enough along in the months that we can extend our comparison with the unemployment rate:

Despite the increase in jobless claims in the last few weeks, there is every reason to believe that the unemployment rate, which follows claims with a lag, will decline further in the next several months.

Even adjusting for gas prices, consumers went on a (wealth effect- generated?) spending spree in May

 

 - by New Deal democrat

Consumer spending is about 70% of the economy, and retail sales is our first wide measure of that spending. And since consumption leads employment, it is an important real world measure. In May, after two months of being dominated by gas prices, it was even more decisively driven by a likely splurge tied to the wealth effect from Booming stock prices.

Nominally, total retail sales rose 0.9% in May, but after taking the monthly 0.5% increase in consumer prices into account, real sales rose 0.4% (blue):

Since gas prices have been a major driver of inflation in the past few months, here’s a look at the monthly % changes in nominal retail sales excluding gas stations (orange) vs. total retail sales (blue). Retail sales excluding-gas increased 0.7%:

Since CPI increased 0.5%, and excluding energy rose only 0.2% in May, both of these are positive in “real” terms as well.

On a YoY basis, nominal total retail sales were up 6.9%, but in real terms were only up 2.6%. Excluding gasoline, nominal sales YoY were up 5.4%, and deflating by using CPI excluding energy were up 2.5%:

In both the March and April personal income and spending reports, we saw that consumes handled gas prices increases by essentially just putting the extra spending on their credit cards. Last month I suggested that consumers might have switched to a “wait and see” mode, but this month’s report indicates that consumers have been spending with wild abandon - as has been indicated for weeks by the Redbook sales report, the four week average of which as of this week is up 9.1% YoY nominally!:

This isn’t because wages have been increasing sharply. Quite the contrary, as we saw with the employment report. Rather, it is *very* likely that this is “wealth effect” spending by upper income consumers triggered by the near 20% rise in the stock market since the end of March.

Finally, since consumption leads employment, here is the update of YoY real retail sales (/2 for scale) together with employment (red):

This suggests that on a YoY basis the rebound we have seen in the last three jobs reports is likely to continue in the next several months. Which is all good news, provided the stock market wealth that is likely driving consumption reflects a Boom rather than a bubble.