Business Cycle Indicators - BCI
Categories: Econ, Index Funds
You’ve heard of the Consumer Price Index and other economic indicators such as consumer confidence, factory orders, and new housing permits. These are all business cycle indicators (BCI).
But who bothers to collect all this information?
An organization called the Conference Board is a not-for-profit research organization that has 1,200 members in 60 countries. They gather data from both private and public companies, as well as the government, and then publish leading indicators (consumer expectations, stock prices, interest rate spread) and lagging indicators (average length of unemployment, average prime rate, consumer price index, commercial lending activity) to forecast changes in the direction of the overall economy.
By studying the peaks and valleys of the past, they try to predict when the next recession will hit or when the next boom will happen in the stock market.
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Finance: What is economic cyclicality ("...13778 Views
Finance allah shmoop What is economic cyclicality All right Well
if you looked at the history of growth and decline
in the u s economy you think it was run
by a bunch of knuckleheads Meat would poop and poop
all in congress Now surprisingly o r maybe not In
fact economic cyclicality is a reflection of resource glut and
then scarcity and the willingness of buyers Teo you know
buy stuff that is when times were good consumers and
businesses by things hire workers consume commodities at office space
and factories until there is a shift in tastes and
sentiment You know like the horse industry before henry ford
came along anyway Sometimes the shift that triggers an economic
cycle comes from the government like when times air too
good there's usually rampant inflation People in companies will simply
choose to just pay up the extra two bucks a
foot to a rent office space The company can pass
on that extra cost by raising its prices to customers
from eighty dollars a year to ninety dollars and nobody
will notice until they do Yeah the government wanted desperately
to cool inflation in the nineteen seventies so the fed
raised short term borrowing rate costs dramatically from somewhere in
the three to four percent range to closer to like
ten percent And the cost of renting money became so
expensive And because companies were highly leveraged borrowing money to
build factories and hire workers and expand that well then
everything contracted with leverage right So they had all this
debt and revenues went down They still to pay the
dead and well that was a bad scene So inflation
was contained at the cost of a vastly cooler economy
So things contract then like a scared turtle or a
you know like when it do jumps in a cold
ocean and all right But then eventually one brave alligator
emerges to see if it concrete's back up under the
top of the food chain and eat some chickens or
dear Whatever alligators eat what do they eat anyway And
the consumer starts buying things adding risk rever been reducing
it and the cycle takes off again gets picture You
know it's the circle the circle of life round and
round It goes where it stops Well actually we do 00:02:15.523 --> [endTime] know Circle of economy