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Ask HN: Favorite Real-Time Economic Indicators?
With some places starting to leave quarantine in various forms, I'm looking for indicators to get a sense of when the economy is starting to recover.
Does anyone have any favorite real-time (or near real-time) economic indicators? One example is opentable's "State of the Restaurant Industry" (https://www.opentable.com/state-of-industry), which shows the previous day's bookings rate. I'm not looking for ones global in scope, just ones that are short-term and not obvious (such as stock market indices, oil prices). Other examples could be traffic, electricity loadings, etc.
Many indicators published by governments are lagging indicators (e.g., unemployment numbers, WARN notices). I'm curious to get a sense if people are starting to return to normal life.
- 1cvmask 6y agoBest indicator is energy consumption of businesses and industry.
- supahfly_remix 6y agoGood suggestion. Do you have any publicly accessible links? Previously, I looked at Texas grid which publishes data hourly(http://www.ercot.com/gridinfo/load/load_hist/ http://www.ercot.com/gridinfo/load/load_hist/), but I didn't really understand what I was looking at nor what a good baseline is.
- programd 6y agoFor the global economy, the Baltic Dry Index. It's a benchmark for the price of moving major raw materials by sea. Surprisingly, it's at about the same value as last year at this time - so not horrible - and seems to have bottomed out last month. Good news overall. https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/baltic https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/baltic
- supahfly_remix 6y agoThat's a nice one.