NGDP Outlook
Let’s do a recap of the recent history of NGDP expectations. At the End of Q3 2018, the NGDP outlook was nearly fantastic. Throughout Q3, year-ahead expected NGDP, as interpreted by out market-driven forecast engine was holding around 5%. When Q4 began, there was a small dip in the year-ahead expectation, arising from the shift to a new four-quarter window in our calculation of YoY growth, not data. The quarter started out fine, with expectations hitting 4.6% on November 7, 2018. Things went south from there; following a series bearish Fed actions and non-actions, in the face of flailing markets… Read More
- NGDP Christmas Update 24 Dec 2018
We wish you a Merry/Happy Christmas, but regret that the only gift we have is a delayed forecast update, and gloomy one at that. This quarter has been a disaster for the outlook. We started at 4.7% expected current-dollar growth and are ending at 3.4%. This is the biggest drop in a forecast we’ve seen in a quarter. At 3.4%, the NGDP outlook has swung from a post-recession high, to the lowest level since early 2017. If this forecast proves accurate, the weaker NGDP path won’t cause a recession, but it is inexplicably irresponsible of the Fed to in October… Read More
- NGDP Outlook Update – November 2018 1 Nov 2018
We got our first read on Q3 2018 NGDP last week, it came in at $20.659 trillion, right in line with our model’s number of $20.684 trillion, based simply on the model’s time series ‘momentum’ of the recent NGDP component and the market prices component. Recent NGDP movements are the best predictor of future NGPD movements, even more so than market signals; so often NGDP updates can move our forecast quite a bit, but not this time. Instead, the forecast has dropped due to…you guessed it…the huge drop in US equity prices, commodities, a bearish shift in the yield curve… Read More
- NGDP Outlook Update: Surging into 2019 23 Sep 2018
We’ve said before that the US economy is not currently booming, this is demonstrably true. Growth in Q1 and Q2 was a nice surprise, welcome, but we’re not yet partying like it’s 1999. The past week has however seen the outlook improve markedly with our forecast for year-over-year NGDP growth in Q3 2019 waxing to 5.2% and the Hypermind market for Q1 2019 hitting a similar number. Our forecast system, which produces projections for all quarters in the coming year, has the Q1 2019 figure at nearly 6%, well ahead of Hypermind. If we actually see a few quarters of… Read More
We’ve recently overhauled our forecasting system. It was a good time to do this, as the recent GDP revisions could have altered the statistical relationships between NGDP and our market-derived factors. Updating the forecast system The starting point for our forecasting approach is to assume that Market Monetarism is true enough to be useful. We take it as given that a weak form Efficient Market’s hypothesis is in play, and that an important determinant of many traded financial market prices is the expected path of US nominal GDP. It is easy enough to point out that market prices assume certain… Read More
NGDP Forecast
The market-driven nominal GDP forecast is updated using closing prices of a set of assets for each trading day. The plot below shows year-ahead forecasts for each day, in effect showing what markets expected for nominal growth in the coming year at each particular day. The NGDP forecast is driven by the S&P 500, 5-year TIPS spreads, copper prices, 3-month Treasury bill yields, two-year Treasury yields, the US dollar index and front-month oil futures. Aside from the design of the models used to produce the forecast, no human judgement or secondary adjustment is used in the forecast: only the market data and government nominal GDP statistics are used to produce the forecast.
The forecast is of quarterly, year-on-year NGDP growth for a year ahead. At the end of each quarter our forecast trips over into a new quarter, so generating a discrete break at that point. We look at medium term growth as it excludes near term noise from fiscal policy changes, volatile price moves, inventories and net exports. Trend growth is what matters and that is best seen by looking out further than just one or two quarters.