Economists use various methods, including GDP and financial indicators, to forecast business cycles, but the process is challenging due to the frequent revision of economic indicators. Stock market performance can also serve as a precursor to future economic activity.
Economists run different business cycle forecasting methods. These financial experts may have opinions about a regional economy or about global conditions. Predicting Future Cycles includes compiling a range of economic indicators and predicting how gross domestic product (GDP), a measure of an economy’s growth, will continue. One challenge is that economic indicators are frequently revised, which makes the process of forecasting future economic activity sometimes tenuous.
GDP, which is an indication of regional production and spending on locally made goods and services, is a telling piece of economic data that is released quarterly. Businesses and governments are interested in knowing the rate of growth or contraction, because that pace can influence future economic activity as well as corporate profits. Each quarter, when GDP is revealed, the reporting body, such as the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) in the US, has the potential to revise the previous period’s results. This affects business cycle forecasting because economists rely on actual data to make projections for future economic conditions. Subsequently, it is sometimes necessary to have a year’s GDP and other data from other economic indicators to reasonably forecast short-term or long-term activity.
Some of the measures used for business cycle forecasting are closer to home. For example, the size of financial deposits made by individuals or companies is an indication of how large the consumption of money may or may not be. These seemingly remote activities are important to economists who are trying to gauge future business cycles. This business cycle forecasting method can be applied by recording financial activity at banks and some brokerages that take deposits from customers and tracking it against GDP.
Investors turn to market barometers, which are traded indices, to get a sense of the direction of financial markets in general. Economists also do this in forecasting the business cycle. In the US, the S&P 500 is a broad representation of stock market activity.
According to the Leonard N. Stern School of Business at New York University, stock market performance can serve as a precursor to future economic activity. This can be especially accurate when an economy is entering a recession. While each stock market downturn does not always lead to depressed conditions in the economy, prolonged periods of downward pressure on stocks can be reason for economists running business cycle forecasting to take a closer look at the relationship.
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