Business Cycle Index Signals No Recession
iMarket Signals | Apr 28, 2016 09:21AM ET
Knowing when the U.S. economy is heading for recession is paramount for successful investment decisions. Our weekly Business Cycle Index (BCI) would have provided early warnings for the past seven recessions.
The BCI at 203.2 is up from last week’s upward revised 202.6. It reached a new high in the current business cycle, which is indicated by BCIp now at 100. The 6-month smoothed annualized growth BCIg at 13.2 is also up from last week’s 12.9. No recession is signaled.
Figure 1 plots BCIp, BCI, BCIg and the S&P 500 together with the thresholds (red lines) that need to be crossed to be able to call a recession.
The BCI uses the below listed economic data, and combining the components for the index in “real time”, i.e. the data is only incorporated into the index at its publication date.
- 10-Year treasury yield (daily)
- 3-Month treasury bill yield (daily)
- S&P 500 (daily)
- Continued claims seasonally adjusted (weekly)
- All employees: total private industries (monthly)
- New houses for sale (monthly)
- New houses sold (monthly)
The 6-month smoothed annualized growth rate of series is a well-established method to extract an indicator from the series. We use this method to obtain BCIg, i.e. the calculated growth rate with 6.0 added to it, which generates, on past performance, an average 11 week leading recession signal when BCIg falls below zero. Further, the index BCI retreats from its cyclic peak prior to a recession in a well-defined manner allowing the extraction of the alternate indicator BCIp (and its variant BCIw) from which, on average, 20 week leading recession signal is generated when BCIp falls below 25. A more detailed explanation/description can be found here .
Figure 2 plots the history of BCI, BCIg, and the LOG (S&P 500) since July 1967, and Figure 3 plots the history of BCIp, i.e 46 years of history which include seven recessions, each of which the BCIg and BCIp managed to indicate timely. The week's lead to a recessions are indicated on the plots.
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