Hands-On: Tracking US Output With Alphacast
By Maia Mindel (mmindel@alphacast.io) Read more Alphacast Highlights here Whether or not the US economy will enter a recession in 2023 is a crucial question for most analysts, given the financial tensions observed over the last month, resulting from the highest interest rates in decades. Unlike most countries, that define a recession based on two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth, the United States utilizes a different definition - one provided by the NBER Business Cycle Dating Committee, which determines the business cycle peaks (and troughs) based on a series of 11 indicators. You can follow those, as well as the unemployment rate (utilized, though not directly, by NBER) in this dashboard. There is further analysis of what signs these indicators provide for output here. Most of the data is available on Alphacast so far, in repositories such as the Bureau of Labor Statistics or the Bureau of Economic Analysis. However, unfortunately, a handful are not, and analyzing the complete breadth of data required is not always a possibility. Thus, this hands-on guide will show how to obtain the data from the FRED datasets, compile it, transform it, and present it - as it is in this pipeline. Given that...