I think before you can declare any indicator a success or failure, you need to put into context what decision you are trying to make off the indicator. If you

I think before you can declare any indicator a success or failure, you need to put into context what decision you are trying to make off the indicator. If you are trying to decide wether to dump all your stocks into treasury bills in the next 90 days, but before an actual recessionary drop, then yes it's a poor indicator (and likely there is no indicator to answer this question). But if you're looking at a long term allocation of your assets, or a corporation trying to plan investments long term then maybe it's relevant. It's hard to look at the long run GDP rate (from the50's on) and think we're going to return to past rates until we fix our inequality problem. They've been inversely related for multiple decades now.