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To: Real Man who wrote (394672)	9/21/2009 11:36:31 AM
From: carranza2	Respond to of 436258

The Conference Board's LEI is again positive. Its description bears examination: news.prnewswire.com LEADING INDICATORS Five of the ten indicators that make up The Conference Board LEI for the U.S. increased in August. The positive contributors - beginning with the largest positive contributor - were index of supplier deliveries (vendor performance), the interest rate spread, stock prices, building permits, and the index of consumer expectations. The negative contributors - beginning with the largest negative contributor - were real money supply, average weekly initial claims for unemployment insurance (inverted), and manufacturers' new orders for nondefense capital goods. Average weekly manufacturing hours and manufacturers' new orders for consumer goods and materials* held steady in August. Stock prices area a small part of the mix. I nonetheless have some difficulty in accepting them as an accurate progonosticating tool, though I am not a pro and will generally defer to those who are. If you ignore stock prices and vendor performance, the other elements seem somewhat weak: the index consumer expectations is dream-like, no doubt a very soft number which seems intuitively to have little value in the fine art of reading economic chicken entrails. Interest rate spread and building permits are much more significant. Without other, more solid indices, they do not inspire much confidence. Negatives are real money supply, average weekly initial claims for unemployment compensation, and new orders for capital goods. Those factors have meat on their bones; I should think that they have much more predictive power than the soft positive ones. The ECRI forecast, however, is unambiguously bullish. Too bad its mix of indicators is secret. I cannot imagine that they differ too much from the Conference Board's, however. And I think ECRI is much more sophisticated in its approach than the Conference Board. What a conundrum.