Maybe I am biased by my preference for soft data like ISM. Perhaps I care about ISM New Orders too much. You know what leads the New Orders? Housing. How is the housing market looking right now? We get that picture from the chart above. Sure, I have included more soft data on there from the National Association of Home Builders, but that index has

The history of the economies of Western nations has, since the early nineteenth century, been one of repeated cycles of growth and recession. Typically, four or five years of expansion have been followed by one or two years of retraction, with occasional massive retrenchments lasting five or six years.

For example, everybody works hard to make the country’s economy flourish, yet there is a constant economic decline. Why? Systems mapping and systems dynamics modeling can answer this question and help us understand the system’s behavior over time. By understanding the behavior, we can find the causes as to why the economy is not performing well des

the unemployment rate is usually taken to be a lagging indicator. And sometimes it is. After a recession, businesses may not hire new employees until they are confident about the prospects for recovery, and it can take a long time to get all the unemployed back to work again. But the unemployment rate can also be a leading indicator for consumer de

no economy is not, from time to time, exposed to either good growth or recessions and depressions. Adjusting to that rapidly is what’s important. And crises like the A2 bank saga over which one also has no control test character, steel and grit.

The crisis was not the crash of the markets. Rather, it was what resulted from the crash: a decline in employment and the decline of demand for manufactured products. As sales went down, employment went down. Therefore demand went down, and sales went down further, in a spiral that could not be arrested

Capital cycle analysis, however, focuses on supply rather than demand. Supply prospects are far less uncertain than demand, and thus easier to forecast.