Written by Steven Hansen

The Conference Board Leading Economic Index (LEI) for the U.S. is up 0.1 % in February to 112.1 (2016 = 100). – and the authors say “The U.S. LEI rose slightly in February, but it doesn’t reflect the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic which began to hit the U.S. economy in full by early March”.

This index is designed to forecast the economy for six months in advance. The market (from Econoday) expected this index’s month-over-month change at -0.3 % to 0.4 % (consensus +0.0 %) versus the reported change of 0.1 %

ECRI’s Weekly Leading Index (WLI) is forecasting little growth over the next six months.

Additional comments from the economists at The Conference Board add context to the index’s behavior.

The Conference Board Leading Economic Index® (LEI)for theU.S. edged up 0.1 percent in February to 112.1 (2016 = 100), following a 0.7 percent increase in January, and a 0.3 percent decline in December.

“The U.S. LEI rose slightly in February, but it doesn’t reflect the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic which began to hit the U.S. economy in full by early March. The slight gain in February came only from half of the LEI components. In particular, the recovery in manufacturing, which looked promising until February, will now be short-lived because of the disruption in global supply chains and falling demand,” said Ataman Ozyildirim, Senior Director of Economic Research at The Conference Board. “Declines in stock prices, consumers’ outlook on economic conditions, manufacturing new orders, average workweek in manufacturing, and rising unemployment claims will begin to negatively impact the economy. As a result, the economy may already be entering into a period of contraction.”

The Conference Board Coincident Economic Index® (CEI) for the U.S. increased 0.3 percent in February to 107.6 (2016 = 100), following a 0.1 percent increase in January, and no change in December.

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LEI as an Economic Monitoring Tool:

The methodology for this index was “improved” in December 2011.

As a comparison to the LEI, ECRI’s WLI (which Econintersect reports on each week) is now in expansion showing weaker growth.

Current ECRI WLI Index

Econintersect believes the USA economy is expanding at Main Street level. (analysis here).

Caveats on the Use of the Leading Economic Index (LEI)

This index is produced by The Conference Board (a private money-making company) – who charges for the details of the indices they publish – although the summary of this index is available to the public. It’s designed to predict economic growth over the next six months.

This is not a “black box” economic forecasting index as The Conference Board publishes the components. It was completely revised with the release of the December 2011 (analysis comparing the old and new index components – click here). The new components of the index and multipliers:

The index does not adjust for inflation or population growth, is not final for several months after being published, and is subject to annual revision. The methodology in producing this index:

1) normalized levels of the indicator rather than its monthly changes will be used to calculate the component contributions of components based on diffusion indexes such as the ISM New Orders Index; 2) when component data are missing, autoregressions in log differences instead of levels will be used to calculate the statistical imputation of the missing months; 3) trend adjustment will be done in two periods: 1959-1983 and 1984-2010 (same as the volatility adjustment); and 4) LCI contributions to the LEI are calculated from its levels (not monthly changes) and it is inverted As a result of these changes, the history of the revised indexes and their month-over-month changes will no longer be directly comparable to those issued prior to the comprehensive benchmark revision. Based on its performance since 1990, and especially before and during the 2008-2009 recession, the new LEI should provide more accurate predictions of business cycle peaks and troughs.

Econintersect has published correlations of the new LEI to past recessions. At first glance, this index provides a recession warning.

The fly-in-the-ointment is that this analysis is that the above graph is not a real-time analysis. Consider that the LEI is not final when first issued – it is subject to revision for months. From The Conference Board:

To address the problem of lags in available data, those leading, coincident and lagging indicators that are not available at the time of publication are estimated using statistical imputation. An autoregressive model is used to estimate each unavailable component. The resulting indexes are therefore constructed using real and estimated data, and will be revised as the unavailable data during the time of publication become available. Such revisions are part of the monthly data revisions, now a regular part of the U.S. Business Cycle Indicators program.

The data does not exist to establish what The Conference Board’s LEI values would have been in real-time – at this point, only the final numbers are known. Unfortunately, knowing the current values is no assurance that a recession is or is not imminent as there is no track record of real-time performance.

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