>>There's no real benefit (or downside) to being "early" or "late" to calling the recession. For people interested in understanding exactly what the economy do

>>There's no real benefit (or downside) to being "early" or "late" to calling the recession. For people interested in understanding exactly what the economy does in detail, of course it is more important to get it right than getting it early. However, for some sets of short-medium-term investors, there could be a very real benefit to calling the trend correctly and early. I'm quite convinced that what is happening here is what happens to every complex system after a large uncontrolled disturbance - all the subsystems oscillate wildly and often not with the same leading/following indicators. This is just that happening until it gets damped. I see a key real-time recession indicator as just the level of traffic in the area (I'm north of Boston). Obviously not hard numbers, but quiet vs dense & fast traffic seems to indicate better whether we're going into recession or not. The traffic has only increased since the beginning of the year, and indeed, the last quarter came out as 2%+ growth...