Measured by NY Fed WEI, OECD Weekly Tracker, and Baumeister, Leiva-Leon and Sims WECI.
figure 1: Lewis-Mertens-Stock (NY Fed) Weekly Economic Index (blue), Woloszko (OECD) Weekly Tracker (tan), Baumeister-Leiva-Leon-Sims US Weekly Economic Conditions Index plus 2% trend (green) Source : Passed by the New York Fed Fred, OECD, Wisioand the authors’ calculations.
The WEI was down slightly from the previous week, from 2.3% to 2.2%, while the Weekly Tracker was up. To be fair, there is some disagreement, which is not surprising as the methodologies vary widely. WEI relies on correlations of ten series (eg, unemployment claims, fuel sales, retail sales) available at weekly frequencies. Weekly Tracker – 1.5% – is a “big data” approach that uses Google Trends and machine learning to track GDP.
If the 2.2% reading continued throughout the quarter, the WEI reading for the week ended 10/8 was 2.72%, which could be interpreted as a 2.2% quarterly growth rate. The OECD Weekly Tracker reading of 1.5% can be interpreted as a 1.5% annual/yr growth rate through 9/24 (the series is down significantly from the previous version).This Baumeister et al. The 1.2% reading was interpreted as beating the long-term trend growth rate of 1.2%. The average growth rate of US GDP from 2000-19 was about 2%, so that would imply an annual growth rate of 3.2% as of 10/8.
Since these are year-over-year growth rates, we may be in a recession in the first half because an observer suggested a month ago, but it (still) seems unlikely.
