ECRI Recession Watch: Weekly Update

Transcription

1 ECRI Recession Watch: Weekly Update May 23, 2014 by Doug Short of Advisor Perspectives (dshort.com) The Weekly Leading Index (WLI) of the Economic Cycle Research Institute (ECRI) is at 135.1, down from the previous week's The WLI annualized growth indicator (WLIg) rose to 5.0 from 4.9. That's the highest since June of last year. ECRI has been at the center of a prolonged controversy since publicizing its recession call on September 30, The company had made the announcement to its private clients on September 21st. ECRI's cofounder and spokesman, Lakshman Achuthan, subsequently forecast that the recession would begin in Q1 2012, or Q2 at the latest. He later identified mid-2012 as the start of the recession. Over the past two years he has been a frequent guest on the likes of CNBC and Bloomberg TV, where he has adamantly maintained the company's position. ECRI's Latest Public Commentary The latest public communication remains Lakshman Achuthan's May 1 appearance on WSJ Live. Interestingly, the interview includes no reference to ECRI's recession call, instead focusing on whether the winter economic downturn was weather-related or reflective of a cyclical downturn. Page 1, 2018 Advisor Perspectives, Inc. All rights reserved.

2 The ECRI Indicator Year-over-Year Is the U.S. Heading Toward a Deeper Downturn? (click to view) Here is a chart of ECRI's data that illustrates why the company's published proprietary indicator has lost credibility as a recession indicator. It's the smoothed year-over-year percent change since 2000 of their weekly leading index. I've highlighted the 2011 date of ECRI's original recession call and the hypothetical July 2012 business cycle peak, which the company previously claimed was the start of a recession. I've update the chart to include the "epicenter" (Achuthan's terminology) of the hypothetical recession. pushed forward by three months from the original start. Page 2, 2018 Advisor Perspectives, Inc. All rights reserved.

3 As for the disconnect between the stock market and the mid-2012 recession start date, Achuthan has repeatedly pointed out that the market can rise during recessions. See for example the 2:05 minute point in the November 4th video. The next chart gives us a visualization of the S&P 500 during the nine recessions since the S&P 500 was initiated in I've included a dotted line to show how the index has performed since ERIC's original July 2012 recession start date (now adjusted forward by three months). Click to View Here are two notable developments since ECRI's public recession call on September 30, 2011: The S&P 500 is up 62.8% at yesterday's close and, as I type this, trading at a record high. The unemployment rate has dropped from 9.0% to 6.3%. Why ECRI's Recession Forecast Was a Blunder ECRI's recession forecast was doomed from the very day (September 21, 2011) that company alerted its private clients. On that same day the Fed announced Operation Twist, which was shortly thereafter followed by QE3. Page 3, 2018 Advisor Perspectives, Inc. All rights reserved.

4 Eventually we will have another recession. But the aggressive monetary policy of the Fed almost certainly dodged the recession bullet in ECRI's timeframe, regardless of the asset bubbles it may have created in doing so. For alternatives to ECRI's recession forecasting, see method developed by Anton and Georg Vrba: im's Weekly Business Cycle Index See also Dwaine Van Vuuren's latest RecessionALERT indicator snapshot: RecessionALERT Weekly Leading Index Update Appendix: A Closer Look at the ECRI Index Despite the increasing irrelevance of the ECRI's recession indicators in recent years, let's check them out. The Page 4, 2018 Advisor Perspectives, Inc. All rights reserved.

5 first chart below shows the history of the Weekly Leading Index and highlights its current level. For a better understanding of the relationship of the WLI level to recessions, the next chart shows the data series in terms of the percent off the previous peak. In other words, a new weekly high registers at 100%, with subsequent declines plotted accordingly. Click to View As the chart above illustrates, only once has a recession ended without the index level achieving a new high -- the two recessions, commonly referred to as a "double-dip," in the early 1980s. Our current level is still off the most recent high, which was set back in June of We've exceeded the previously longest stretch between highs, which was from February 1973 to April But the index level rose steadily from the trough at the end of the recession to reach its new high in The pattern in ECRI's indictor is quite different, and this has no doubt been a key factor in their business cycle analysis. The WLIg Metric The best known of ECRI's indexes is their growth calculation on the WLI. For a close look at this index in recent months, here's a snapshot of the data since Page 5, 2018 Advisor Perspectives, Inc. All rights reserved.

6 Now let's step back and examine the complete series available to the public, which dates from ECRI's WLIg metric has had a respectable record for forecasting recessions and rebounds therefrom. The next chart shows the correlation between the WLI, GDP and recessions. Page 6, 2018 Advisor Perspectives, Inc. All rights reserved.

7 The History of ECRI's Latest Recession Call ECRI's weekly leading index has become a major focus and source of controversy ever since September 30, 2011, when ECRI publicly announced that the U.S. is tipping into a recession, a call the Institute had announced to its private clients on September 21st. Here is an excerpt from the announcement: Early last week, ECRI notified clients that the U.S. economy is indeed tipping into a new recession. And there's nothing that policy makers can do to head it off. ECRI's recession call isn't based on just one or two leading indexes, but on dozens of specialized leading indexes, including the U.S. Long Leading Index, which was the first to turn down before the Arab Spring and Japanese earthquake to be followed by downturns in the Weekly Leading Index and other shorter-leading indexes. In fact, the most reliable forward-looking indicators are now collectively behaving as they did on the cusp of full-blown recessions, not "soft landings." (Read the report here.) Year-over-Year Growth in the WLI Page 7, 2018 Advisor Perspectives, Inc. All rights reserved.

8 Triggered by another ECRI commentary, Why Our Recession Call Stands, I now include a snapshot of the yearover-year growth of the WLI rather than ECRI's previously favored method of calculating the WLIg series from the underlying WLI (see the endnote below). Specifically the chart immediately below is the year-over-year change in the 4-week moving average of the WLI. The red dots highlight the YoY value for the month when recessions began. The WLI YoY is now at 3.5%, which is higher than the onset of six of the seven recessions in the chart timeframe, although well off its 7.5% interim high set in mid-june. The second half of the early 1980s double dip, which was to some extent an engineered recession to break the back of inflation, is a conspicuous outlier in this series, and it started at a WLI YoY of 4.1%. Additional Sources for Recession Forecasts Dwaine van Vuuren, CEO of RecessionAlert.com, and his collaborators, including Georg Vrba and Franz Lischka, have developed a powerful recession forecasting methodology that shows promise of making forecasts with fewer false positives, which I take to include excessively long lead times, such as ECRI's September 2011 recession call. Here is today's update of Georg Vrba's analysis, which is explained in more detail in this article. Page 8, 2018 Advisor Perspectives, Inc. All rights reserved.

9 Earlier Video Chronology of ECRI's Recession Call September 30, 2011 : Recession Is "Inescapable" (link) September 30, 2011 : Tipping into a New Recession (link) February 24, 2012 : GDP Data Signals U.S. Recession (link) May 9, 2012 : Renewed U.S. Recession Call (link) July 10, 2012 : "We're in Recession Already" (link) September 13, 2012 : "U.S. Economy Is in a Recession" (link) Note: How to Calculate the Growth series from the Weekly Leading Index ECRI's weekly Excel spreadsheet includes the WLI and the Growth series, but the latter is a series of values without the underlying calculations. After a collaborative effort by Franz Lischka, Georg Vrba, Dwaine van Vuuren and Kishor Bhatia to model the calculation, Georg discovered the actual formula in a 1999 article published by Anirvan Banerji, the Chief Research Officer at ECRI: " The three Ps: simple tools for monitoring Page 9, 2018 Advisor Perspectives, Inc. All rights reserved.

10 economic cycles - pronounced, pervasive and persistent economic indicators." Here is the formula: "MA1" = 4 week moving average of the WLI "MA2" = moving average of MA1 over the preceding 52 weeks "n"= 52/26.5 "m"= 100 WLIg = [m*(ma1/ma2)^n] m Page 10, 2018 Advisor Perspectives, Inc. All rights reserved.