The Big Four Economic Indicators

Industrial Production and Real Retail Sales

Note from dshort: This commentary has been revised to include this morning's release of the February data for Industrial Production and Wednesday's report on February Retail Sales, which we can now adjust with today's Consumer Price Index data.


Official recession calls are the responsibility of the NBER Business Cycle Dating Committee, which is understandably vague about the specific indicators on which they base their decisions. This committee statement is about as close as they get to identifying their method.

There is, however, a general belief that there are four big indicators that the committee weighs heavily in their cycle identification process. They are:

  • Industrial Production
  • Real Personal Income (excluding transfer payments)
  • Employment
  • Real Retail Sales (a more timely substitute for Real Manufacturing and Trade Sales)

The Latest Indicator Data: Industrial Production and Real Retail Sales

I've now updated this commentary to include the February Industrial Production, the purple line in the chart below and Real Retail Sales, the green line. The February Industrial Production data, with revisions for the previous five months, has risen for four consecutive months and is now 19.2% above its June 2009 recession trough. The Real Retail Sales indicator has also risen for four consecutive months, the last three of which have been all-time highs.

The chart and table below illustrate the performance of the Big Four and simple average of the four since the end of the Great Recession.

Current Assessment and Outlook

With the exception of Real Personal Income Less Transfer Payments (e.g., Social Security, Supplementary Security Income, workers compensation, etc.), the Big Four continue to show expansion. The seemingly bizarre income data is the result of the end-of-year strategy of early bonuses and moving forward of 2013 income to avoid higher taxes. We've seen this situation before in the 1990s. The PI anomaly is the reason the average for the Big Four (the gray line above) has shows contraction for the past two months.

The next PI less TP, available on March 29th, be a key input for gauging the direction of our Q1 economy. Real personal income -- individual and household -- has been a chronically weak indicator. See, for example my latest update on monthly household incomes. If we ignore the blip in the upper right quadrant of my chart four pack, we see that PI less TP was flat in 2011 and the second half of 2012.

And of course all recent data are subject to further revision, so we must view these numbers accordingly.

Background Analysis: The Big Four Indicators and Recessions

The charts above don't show us the individual behavior of the Big Four leading up to the 2007 recession. To achieve that goal, I've plotted the same data using a "percent off high" technique. In other words, I show successive new highs as zero and the cumulative percent declines of months that aren't new highs. The advantage of this approach is that it helps us visualize declines more clearly and to compare the depth of declines for each indicator and across time (e.g., the short 2001 recession versus the Great Recession). Here is my own four-pack showing the indicators with this technique.

Now let's examine the behavior of these indicators across time. The first chart below graphs the period from 2000 to the present, thereby showing us the behavior of the four indicators before and after the two most recent recessions. Rather than having four separate charts, I've created an overlay to help us evaluate the relative behavior of the indicators at the cycle peaks and troughs. (See my note below on recession boundaries).

The chart above is an excellent starting point for evaluating the relevance of the four indicators in the context of two very different recessions. In both cases, the bounce in Industrial Production matches the NBER trough while Employment and Personal Incomes lagged in their respective reversals.

As for the start of these two 21st century recessions, the indicator declines are less uniform in their behavior. We can see, however, that Employment and Personal Income were laggards in the declines.

Now let's look at the 1972-1985 period, which included three recessions -- the savage 16-month Oil Embargo recession of 1973-1975 and the double dip of 1980 and 1981-1982 (6-months and 16-months, respectively).

And finally, for sharp-eyed readers who can don't mind squinting at a lot of data, here's a cluttered chart from 1959 to the present. That is the earliest date for which all four indicators are available. The main lesson of this chart is the diverse patterns and volatility across time for these indicators. For example, retail sales and industrial production are far more volatile than employment and income.

History tells us the brief periods of contraction are not uncommon, as we can see in this big picture since 1959, the same chart as the one above, but showing the average of the four rather than the individual indicators.

The chart clearly illustrates the savagery of the last recession. It was much deeper than the closest contender in this timeframe, the 1973-1975 Oil Embargo recession. While we've yet to set new highs, the trend has collectively been upward, although we have that strange anomaly caused by the late 2012 tax-planning strategy that impacted the Personal Income.

Source: Advisor Perspectives

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dshort [at] advisorperspectives [dot] com ()
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