Rickards: Fed’s Looking in Wrong Direction

May 02, 2023

by James Rickards Daily Reckoning

What’s the situation with the economy? The short answer is not good. Here’s why…

There are literally hundreds of economic indicators either as hard data or sentiment surveys released daily. It’s impossible for any analyst to keep up with all of them.

But with computers, natural language processing and charts, it is possible to follow broad trends. The key for any good analyst is to settle on a subset of data that has the greatest predictive power and a long track record of getting things right.

It’s equally important to know whether indicators are leading, concurrent or lagging.

A lagging indicator may be a measure of how bad things are, but it comes too late to do anything to stop the bad turn. By the time you see it, a recession has already begun.