Big 4 Economic Indicators: Current Assessment And Outlook
Doug Short | Nov 12, 2013 01:30AM ET
Note from dshort: This commentary has been revised to include Friday's release of Nonfarm Payrolls and Personal Income data.
Official recession calls are the responsibility of the NBER Business Cycle Dating Committee, which is understandably vague about the specific indicators on which they base their decisions. This committee statement is about as close as they get to identifying their method.
There is, however, a general belief that there are four big indicators that the committee weighs heavily in their cycle identification process. They are:
- Industrial Production
- Real Personal Income (excluding transfer payments)
- Nonfarm Employment
- Real Retail Sales (a timelier substitute for Real Manufacturing and Trade Sales)
The Latest Indicator Data
Friday's Nonfarm Payrolls for October surprised to the upside, with a 204K new jobs, although economist John Williams of note below on recession boundaries).
The chart above is an excellent starting point for evaluating the relevance of the four indicators in the context of two very different recessions. In both cases, the bounce in Industrial Production matches the NBER trough while Employment and Personal Incomes lagged in their respective reversals.
As for the start of these two 21st century recessions, the indicator declines are less uniform in their behavior. We can see, however, that Employment and Personal Income were laggards in the declines.
Now let's look at the 1972-1985 period, which included three recessions -- the savage 16-month Oil Embargo recession of 1973-1975 and the double dip of 1980 and 1981-1982 (6-months and 16-months, respectively).
And finally, for sharp-eyed readers who can don't mind squinting at a lot of data, here's a cluttered chart from 1959 to the present. That is the earliest date for which all four indicators are available. The main lesson of this chart is the diverse patterns and volatility across time for these indicators. For example, retail sales and industrial production are far more volatile than employment and income.
History tells us the brief periods of contraction are not uncommon, as we can see in this big picture since 1959, the same chart as the one above, but showing the average of the four rather than the individual indicators.
The chart clearly illustrates the savagery of the last recession. It was much deeper than the closest contender in this timeframe, the 1973-1975 Oil Embargo recession. While we've yet to set new highs, the trend has collectively been upward, although we have that strange anomaly caused by the late 2012 tax-planning strategy that impacted the Personal Income.
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Here is a close-up of the average since 2000.
Appendix: Chart Gallery with Notes
Each of the four major indicators discussed in this article are illustrated below in three different data manipulations:
- A log scale plotting of the data series to ensure that distances on the vertical axis reflect true relative growth. This adjustment is particularly important for data series that have changed significantly over time.
- A year-over-year representation to help, among other things, identify broader trends over the years.
- A percent-off-high manipulation, which is particularly useful for identifying trend behavior and secular volatility.
Industrial Production
The US Industrial Production Index (Industrial Production chart .
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