Every day, we’re exposed to lots and lots of economic data. There are countless forecasters making economic predictions. Of all the people and organizations predicting the future, none are so consistently accurate as to be reliable. Nevertheless, we do need some way to interpret the trends. We need to see around corners.Context is everything. Information needs to be juxtaposed with the information that preceded it, so that we can understand the patterns in the data. Only by comparing last year’s performance to this year’s performance can we see whether we are progressing toward our goal.

The Economic Corners

It’s dangerous to imagine that you’re looking at unique circumstances and that on this occasion the usual pattern won’t hold. Chances are good that you’re wrong. Look at charts of historical data — you will see these same patterns. Of course, there are unique variations with iterations of each cycle, but the cause and effect relationships stay the same.Capital spending is driven by consumer spending — not the other way around. Capital outlay includes things like facilities and equipment costs. Usually, it’s after growth has been up for a few quarters that companies will update their capacity.

Consumer Spending Drives the Demand Chain in the Economy

Economics professors would also benefit from teaching the ideas in this book. Most economics classes cover a lot of theories and have plenty of graphs, but they don’t use enough real-life data for modeling. 
They need to get down to the nitty-gritty of cause and effect. Economics is great for economists, but there is considerable room for improvement teaching how to use data for real-world questions. Economics should always be taught using historical data.

Making Economics Happen

People with jobs are more likely to spend money, and it should follow that employment drives the economy. But when the economy goes sour, companies fire workers. It should follow that the economy drives employment. Both contradictory statements are true.
The market finally bottoms out. But as employment bottoms out, consumption should already be on its way up. So if you’re scared to get in the market when employment figures are bad, look to see whether consumption is on its way up. If it is, it’s time to act.

Employment and Unemployment

To figure out the relationship between the federal deficit and interest rates, you have to remember that federal debt is just one category of all the debt in the economy. 
There’s also state and local government debt, not to mention consumer debt and corporate debt. In fact, of all the debt in the economy, only 18% is federal debt. By itself, federal debt doesn’t seem to have much of an influence on interest rates, but all debt combined most definitely does.

The Link Between Federal Deficits and Interest Rates

Interest rates have two important effects on the stock market: 1) they affect overall economic growth 2) they affect price-to-earnings ratios. Charting out these relationships is useful for understanding market trends. Consumer spending drives corporate profits and, ultimately, affects the stock market. Because interest rates affect consumer spending, they can also affect the market.

Interest Rates and the Stock Market

One of the forces with the most influence on the economy is the Federal Reserve Board’s influence on interest rates. Some types of interest rates can affect consumer borrowing which affects consumer spending. Because the Federal Reserve Board gets so much media attention, its actions have a psychological effect, influencing impressions of the country’s economic health.As it turns out, consumer spending is influenced by interest rates. We can see that interest rates do in fact lead to spending. Increases in Fed rates presage economic turndowns and vice versa.

Interest Rates, Inflation, and the Economic Cycle

Economic information comes from all angles in the media, constantly exposing us to endless analysis, commentary, opinion and debate. Yet this onslaught doesn’t seem to make us any wiser in knowing where the economy is heading. For the millions of people trying to read the economy, only a few are successful.
Most economic predictions are based on the wrong indicators, so there’s no chance that they will ever produce useful forecasts. Even when the right information is presented, it’s never presented in a way that’s easy for people to understand.

Economic Forecasts Are Worse Than Weather Forecasts

There are two kinds of consumer spending power: personal income (including things like paychecks) and personal wealth (investments and similar things). Income has a large influence on consumer spending — the more money flowing in, the more people have to spend — so you’d think employment would be an important factor for income. 
And it is, however, labour is hired after the economy goes up and fired as it goes down.

Consumer Spending Power

Too much reliance on recession as an indicator is one problem; the second problem is the standard practice of measuring the change in short-term increments– periods so short they can disguise larger trends.The noisy, quarterly charts with wild swings of data and little context are confusing. The better solution is year-over-year charting, which makes trends much easier to spot.Since recessions have been dethroned a new milepost is needed:The rate of change economic tracking (ROCET), tracking turning points in growth, rather than absolute levels, to help make economic forecasts.

Smart Economic Tracking

The Fed rate is also tied to inflation, which impacts earnings, which affects consumer spending. Inflation also moves hourly wages and direct interest rates. This can create the impression that interest rates and consumer spending are more closely related than they are.
The Federal Reserve responds to economic growth rates and inflation rates. When either get too high, they cool things down by raising the Fed rate. When things get sluggish, they raise the rate. Even if consumer spending isn’t interest-rate sensitive, the Federal rate appears to predict consumer spending.

Federal Rates

Leading indicators cycle through several phases. Starting with the last phase of the previous cycle.It’s important to use the right leading indicators. The cause-and-effect relationship should make sense. When they’re charted out together, a causal relationship should be easy to see. But remember: there’s sometimes difficulty knowing if two things have a causal relationship or if the correlation is just casual. You need to evaluate the evidence as best you can.

The Nature of Leading Indicators

<ul><li>At the peak, consumer spending and GDP are growing, profits are rising, and employment is hunky-dory. The stock market continues to peak and investors are enthusiastic.  </li><li>Then, things slow a little. The economy is still growing, but the rate of growth has been reduced. Interest rates rise just a little. The stock market cools down. Soon enough, worry sets in.</li><li>Interest rates and inflation rise. The rate of growth in GDP slows to 2 or 3%. People start predicting a recession. The stock market slumps.</li><li>Finally, the recession hits. GDP declines, profits fall, capital spending declines.</li></ul>

The Four Stages Of Economic Downturns

Real wages, that is to say the actual amount that workers make, is more relevant to growth than changes in the number of employed or unemployed workers. Although often overlooked as a leading economic indicator, wages and salaries are more important than wealth, which usually isn’t as liquid (if it is in the form of an investment, it has to be sold before it can affect the economy). 
Increases in wages will have a greater impact than employment.

Real Earnings

The best time to sell is when the economy is peaking, which is counterintuitive for many people. People want to believe the good times are going to keep rolling. Alternatively, the best time to buy is when the market is still tanking but close to reaching bottom. It’s hard to have faith when everything looks so grim; it takes a lot of self-discipline to time the market like this. We’ve all heard the old saw, “Buy low, sell high.” It’s so obvious, and it gets repeated so often that people take it about as seriously as they would a nursery rhyme.

The Basic Rule To Follow

Eighty percent of GDP is from the demand cycle, wherein consumer spending leads to industrial production which leads to capital spending. How does the demand cycle effect the stock market? Well, lots of things can move the market, but there are only a few consistent, significant market movers out there. The demand cycle shouldn’t be the only factor referenced in forecasting the stock market, but it’s definitely something useful to consider.

Consumer Spending, Corporate Profits, and the Stock Market

Recessions are infrequent. Slowdowns are more important, and when you look at the numbers during these periods, GDP growth is actually inhibited more than you’d imagine if you were just looking at recessions. Recessions are bogeymen. Declining rates of growth are the real culprit.Recessions might have some value in predicting the beginning of a new cycle, but that’s about it.

Recessions Are Overrated

Manufacturers should determine the categories of expenditures or sales that are appropriate for and relevant to their products. Producers can use consumer spending to predict what the upcoming cycle will look like. 
All sorts of sectors are sensitive to consumer spending. For business managers trying to make decisions, looking at performance in the context of historical economic cycles is most instructive.

Forecasting For Your Own Industry or Company

A recession, as a reminder, is defined as more than two-quarters decline in real GDP. This measurement tends to put observers into a simplistic, dualistic head-space. If GDP is positive, then it’s good; if GDP is negative, then it’s bad. A slowdown that doesn’t land GDP in the negatives doesn’t provoke much horror — it’s seen as a soft slowdown, more of a minor worry if anything. But Such slowdowns can cause almost as much damage as proper recessions.

Recessions Vs Slowdowns

There are two big errors in traditional economic analysis. The first mistake is regarding recession as the main indication of economic slowdown. Recession is identified by GDP, but by the time the decline has hit GDP and it reflects the slowdown, significant portions of the economy are already damaged. The second mistake is the practice of tracking economic data quarter to quarter and month to month. This causes a lot of noise; there are lots of adjustments that have to be made to the data. Year-to-year tracking is better.

The Two Big Errors

To get a reasonably good forecast, one has to just construct charts out of historical data and look for possible cause-and-effect relationships.The trick is to be smart about how you chart the relationships. Changing the organization and tracking of data can be useful preparation for analyzing relationships, and the book sets forth a simple method for doing so.

The Basic Trick

Analyzing economic data is as simple as gathering historic and current data from the internet and using Excel or similar software to assemble it all into an easy-to-read chart. Anyone can do this. It doesn’t require special skills or tools. 
Econometric analyses, on the other hand, are complicated statistical analyses that economists use. But these forecasts are less useful than you’d expect. They tend to be rigid in their modelling and don’t provide a complete, dynamic picture of things.

Outdated Methods Of Economic Analysis

Consumer spending dominates the economy. Because it is such a large share of GDP, it drives corporate profits — and corporate profits, as we saw, drive employment. The stock market is a predictive indicator, moving up and down with consumer spending. 
Consumer spending forecasts, then, can be used to predict the stock market, although there are lots of other factors that affect the stock market. Net-net: monitoring consumer spending is the best way to determine where the economy is going.

Consumer Spending Is The Main Driver Of The Economy

Market Cycles have long periods, sometimes lasting years, during economic slowdowns when stocks just aren’t a good investment. In cycle after cycle, businesses always seem to get caught in periodic downturns, and by the time the leaders realize they’re in a downturn, it’s too late to do much about it. 
There’s a traditional fear of recession (defined as two quarters or more of decline of real GDP), but ultimately, the downturn is already in the cards before a recession even hits.

Redefining Economic Downturns

The economic cycle is driven by cause and effect. Personal income drives consumer spending. Businesses respond to consumer spending by increasing production which, in turn, requires greater investments in infrastructure/capital spending. Consumer spending, production and capital spending all drive corporate profits. 
Stock market performance is dependent on corporate profits; corporate profits also drive employment. And so, you see that job growth is at the very end of the food chain. Employment is a trailing economic indicator, and for this reason, it isn’t useful for making forecasts.

Making Sense of The Economy

There are lots of different things that influence consumer spending. There are financial factors (for example, wage and consumer borrowing), fiscal and monetary factors (for example, taxes and interest rates) and there are psychological factors (for example, war, terrorism and instability). There are all different factors, and because there are so many diverse factors, it’s important to focus on a few indicators. Try to find factors that are rooted in common sense and that are proven to have causality over several cycles.

Forecasting Consumer Spending

Ahead of the Curve will arm you with the knowledge you need to deflect useless theories and reject hype. Economic analysis can be a do-it-yourself activity. Instead of tracking absolute increases and declines, the methods in this book look at changes in growth to make economic forecasts. The tools are based entirely on examining historical data for recurring patterns.

Today’s managers and investors are bombarded with so many conflicting economic reports and data that it seems impossible to know which way the market will turn until it’s too late. Now, a thirty-five year Wall Street veteran enables managers and investors to stop relying on conventional economic forecasts (which are usually wrong), and confidently analyse how the market will impact their industry, business, or stocks. The author unveils his proven forecasting model—based on just a few key economic indicators—for identifying major directional changes in the economy and adjusting business and investing strategies accordingly. A simpler and more pragmatic approach to forecasting: user-friendly approach draws from empirical observation and first-hand practice rather than abstract economic theories Great timing: will appeal to the many business people and investors who got burned in the dotcom bust because they didn’t see the downturn coming Proven model developed by a bonafide Wall Street sage: Ellis is widely respected as a sage when it comes to analysing economic trends based on over three decades as a successful Wall Street analyst Novel, counterintuitive, accessible: goes against the grain of common wisdom about what really drives the economy and makes practical tools available to a wide audience of practitioners for the first time Appendix B in the book specifically relates the methodology in the main section of the book to possible application in the UK, Canada, Germany, France, and Japan

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Economic and stock market cycles affect companies in every industry. Unfortunately, a confusing array of anecdotal and conflicting indicators often renders it impossible for managers and investors to see where the economy is heading in time to take corrective action. Now, a 35-year Wall Street veteran unveils a new forecasting method to help managers and investors understand and predict the economic cycles that control their businesses and financial fates. In Ahead of the Curve, Joseph H. Ellis argues that the problem with current forecasting models lies not in the data, but rather in the lack of a clear framework for putting the data in context and reading it correctly. The book explains critical economic indicators in nontechnical language, identifies and documents the recurring cause-and-effect relationships that consistently predict turning points in the economy, and provides the tools managers and investors need to position themselves ahead of cyclical upturns and downturns. Economic events are not as random and unpredictable as they seem. This book helps readers recognize and react to signs of change that their rivals don't see--and win a sizeable competitive advantage. Joseph H. Ellis was a partner at Goldman Sachs and was ranked for 18 consecutive years by Institutional Investor magazine as Wall Street's No.1 retail industry analyst.