Leading Concurrent Or Lagging

Everything you need to easily get a handle on economic indicators In today's volatile, often troubling economic landscape, there are myriad statistics and reports that paint an economic picture that can sometimes resemble a work by Jackson Pollock. These complex and often-conflicting reports could vex even the savviest investor. Economic Indicators For Dummies explains how to interpret and use key global economic indicators to make solid investments, aid in business planning, and help develop informed decisions. In plain English, it breaks down the complex language and statistics to help you make sense of this critical information. You'll discover how to interpret economic data within the context of other sometimes-conflicting reports and statistics, and use the information to make profitable decisions. You'll understand the meaning of such data as employment indices and housing and construction stats and how they affect stocks, bonds, commodities and international markets . . . and how you can use these statistics to make investment decisions as well as plan strategic goals for business growth. Economic Indicators For Dummies breaks down dozens of statistics and patterns to give you a better understanding of how various sources of data and information can be used. Breaks down jargon and statistical concepts Covers how to use publicly available economic indicators to better position your portfolio, improve returns, and make sensible, long-range business plans Discusses the reliability and timeliness of the collected data, while helping investors prioritize the flow of economic information to avoid information overload Whether you're an investor, economics student, or business professional involved in making key strategic decisions for your company, Economic Indicators For Dummies has you covered.

This volume presents the most complete collection available of the work of Victor Zarnowitz, a leader in the study of business cycles, growth, inflation, and forecasting.. With characteristic insight, Zarnowitz examines theories of the business cycle, including Keynesian and monetary theories and more recent rational expectation and real business cycle theories. He also measures trends and cycles in economic activity; evaluates the performance of leading indicators and their composite measures; surveys forecasting tools and performance of business and academic economists; discusses historical changes in the nature and sources of business cycles; and analyzes how successfully forecasting firms and economists predict such key economic variables as interest rates and inflation.

A new addition to the popular "Getting Started" series, this easy-to-use introduction to security analysis provides the tools to understanding how and why a portfolio investment strategy works.

Completely updated, this practical guide has the information investors need to keep up in the complex, fast-paced, and highly profitable world of options and futures, where everything is in play - from oil to diamonds, poultry to vaccines, franchises to coffee. Provides cutting edge information on energy futures and options. Tools for creating flexible strategies that can move with the times. New information on the solid standbys like livestock, precious metals, and equities. Keyed to the new realities of the global economy, making this book vital for investors at all levels. Highly respected expert author.

This completely revised and updated edition of Norman Frumkin's acclaimed work offers vital information for the urgent growing debate on the state of the nation's economy. Frumkin makes complex ideas and statistical data accessible to people without special training in economics. His goal in this book is to provide a better understanding of the performance of the American economy, and a basis for evaluating proposals intended to influence its future course. Using data current through the first half of 2003, Frumkin focuses on the meaning and use of a wide array of indicators of economic growth, employment, wages, productivity, investment, saving, and finance in assesing the current state of the U.S. economy and forecasting future developments. Equally useful for economists, students, investors, journalists, and anyone concerned with the economy, this totally revised edition includes detailed coverage of many important new topics, such as terrorism's impact on the economy, federal debt and interest rates, job openings and unemployment, government spending and taxes, the 2001 recession, and much more. Equally usefull for economists, students, investors, and anyone concerned with the economy, this totally revised edition includes detailed coverage of many important new topics, including: --reclaiming American manufacturing; --differential patterns of the expansions of the 1980s and the 1990s-2000; --wealth effect of stock market and housing prices; --significance of consumer confidentce surveys; --age of nonresidential structures and equipment and future investment; --housing affordability; --government spending and tax components; --frequency of tax changes; --taxation and work effort; --sustainability of balance of payments deficits and foreign indebtedness; --jobless recoveries in 1991-92 and 2002-03; --interstate variations in income and unionization; --interstate variations in unemployment insurance; --job openings and unemployment; --terrorism impacts on economic growth and productivity; --spread of oil price changes to the non-energy sectors

For many years a system of leading, coincident, and lagging economic indicators, first developed in the 1930s by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), has been widely used in the United States to appraise the state of the business cycle. Since 1961 the current monthly figures for these indicators have been published by the U.S. Department of Commerce in Business Conditions Digest. Similar systems have been developed by government or private agencies in Canada, Japan, the United Kingdom, and more recently in many other countries. A few years ago the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) set up a working party to develop this type of analysis and most of the member countries participated. The Center for International Business Cycle Research at Rutgers University has given guidance in this field to some fifteen countries during the past three years, in Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Africa and South America. Our purpose in this paper is to explain briefly the theory and rationale underlying this approach to economic forecasting, describe the more important statistical procedures used, and review the evidence on how the indicators have performed in practice. The tests of performance concentrate on data not used in the selection of the indicators, in the United States and nine other countries. We conclude with some suggestions for future research and development, including the application of the approach to the analysis of inflation. [Resumen de autor]