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Strategies & Market Trends : Gorilla and King Portfolio Candidates -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Pirah Naman who wrote (39413)	2/16/2001 7:30:28 PM
From: Bruce Brown	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 54805

I thought the thread might be interested in the 'other' Geoffrey Moore - of which Alan Greenspan was a student of economic statistics and business-cycle research. thestreet.com businesscycle.com Excellent discussion in the interview about the Index of Leading Economic Indicators and how those indicators are used in the first 6 months of slowing growth and subsequently. According to the interview, we are exactly at the 'pivot point' as to whether or not recovering growth or a recession can be determined using the WLI (Weekly Leading Index). Yet it will take another two months to know. Here's one snip from the article, but I highly suggest you read the full article because it is very interesting: Banerji: "What is interesting is that leading indicators are designed to predict recessions. But whether we're headed into a slowdown or a full-scale business-cycle recession, in either case for the first six months or so [from the beginning of a downturn], the pattern is virtually the same. A slowdown and a recession look indistinguishable. (skip) The final straw was record cold temperatures in November and December -- the coldest average temperatures in the U.S. in 106 years of recorded history. When you got that on top of these factors that were already planning to plunge the U.S. economy into recession, you got extreme weakness. That was the situation at the end of December-beginning of January, when the Weekly Leading Index growth rate plunged to a 10-year low. At that point, we were veering very close to a recessionary track. But what's happened in January in the past four weeks is that there's been a steady bounce-back in the WLI growth rate, four straight weeks of back-to-back improvement. That is somewhat encouraging. But the difficulty is to tell whether it's just a dead cat bounce because of warmer weather, or a more fundamental turn away from recession. And right now, the jury's still out. It's not something that is knowable. (skip) If you see the WLI growth rate keep recovering through the rest of February and March, then you could definitely get more confidence in the idea that the economy is veering away from recession." The full interview addresses interest rates, the FED, consumer and investor confidence and what the FED is focused on in diverting a full blown business-cycle recession. BB