Category Archives: yield curve

accuracy of forecasts, Big Data, boosting, macroeconomic forecasting, time series forecasting, yield curve

Leading Indicators

One value the forecasting community can provide is to report on the predictive power of various leading indicators for key economic and business series.

The Conference Board Leading Indicators

The Conference Board, a private, nonprofit organization with business membership, develops and publishes leading indicator indexes (LEI) for major national economies. Their involvement began in 1995, when they took over maintaining Business Cycle Indicators (BCI) from the US Department of Commerce.

For the United States, the index of leading indicators is based on ten variables: average weekly hours, manufacturing,  average weekly initial claims for unemployment insurance, manufacturers’ new orders, consumer goods and materials, vendor performance, slower deliveries diffusion index,manufacturers’ new orders, nondefense capital goods, building permits, new private housing units, stock prices, 500 common stocks, money supply, interest rate spread, and an index of consumer expectations.

The Conference Board, of course, also maintains coincident and lagging indicators of the business cycle.

This list has been imprinted on the financial and business media mind, and is a convenient go-to, when a commentator wants to talk about what’s coming in the markets. And it used to be that a rule of thumb that three consecutive declines in the Index of Leading Indicators over three months signals a coming recession. This rule over-predicts, however, and obviously, given the track record of economists for the past several decades, these Conference Board leading indicators have questionable predictive power.

Serena Ng Research

What does work then?

Obviously, there is lots of research on this question, but, for my money, among the most comprehensive and coherent is that of Serena Ng, writing at times with various co-authors.

SerenaNg

So in this regard, I recommend two recent papers

Boosting Recessions

Facts and Challenges from the Great Recession for Forecasting and Macroeconomic Modeling

The first paper is most recent, and is a talk presented before the Canadian Economic Association (State of the Art Lecture).

Hallmarks of a Serena Ng paper are coherent and often quite readable explanations of what you might call the Big Picture, coupled with ambitious and useful computation – usually reporting metrics of predictive accuracy.

Professor Ng and her co-researchers apparently have determined several important facts about predicting recessions and turning points in the business cycle.

For example –

  1. Since World War II, and in particular, over the period from the 1970’s to the present, there have been different kinds of recessions. Following Ng and Wright, ..business cycles of the 1970s and early 80s are widely believed to be due to supply shocks and/or monetary policy. The three recessions since 1985, on the other hand, originate from the financial sector with the Great Recession of 2008-2009 being a full-blown balance sheet recession. A balance sheet recession involves, a sharp increase in leverage leaves the economy vulnerable to small shocks because, once asset prices begin to fall, financial institutions, firms, and households all attempt to deleverage. But with all agents trying to increase savings simultaneously, the economy loses demand, further lowering asset prices and frustrating the attempt to repair balance sheets. Financial institutions seek to deleverage, lowering the supply of credit. Households and firms seek to deleverage, lowering the demand for credit.
  2. Examining a monthly panel of 132 macroeconomic and financial time series for the period 1960-2011, Ng and her co-researchers find that .. the predictor set with systematic and important predictive power consists of only 10 or so variables. It is reassuring that most variables in the list are already known to be useful, though some less obvious variables are also identified. The main finding is that there is substantial time variation in the size and composition of the relevant predictor set, and even the predictive power of term and risky spreads are recession specific. The full sample estimates and rolling regressions give confidence to the 5yr spread, the Aaa and CP spreads (relative to the Fed funds rate) as the best predictors of recessions.

So, the yield curve, a old favorite when it comes to forecasting recessions or turning points in the business cycle, performs less well in the contemporary context – although other (limited) research suggests that indicators combining facts about the yield curve with other metrics might be helpful.

And this exercise shows that the predictor set for various business cycles changes over time, although there are a few predictors that stand out. Again,

there are fewer than ten important predictors and the identity of these variables change with the forecast horizon. There is a distinct difference in the size and composition of the relevant predictor set before and after mid-1980. Rolling window estimation reveals that the importance of the term and default spreads are recession specific. The Aaa spread is the most robust predictor of recessions three and six months ahead, while the risky bond and 5yr spreads are important for twelve months ahead predictions. Certain employment variables have predictive power for the two most recent recessions when the interest rate spreads were uninformative. Warning signals for the post 1990 recessions have been sporadic and easy to miss.

Let me throw in my two bits here, before going on in subsequent posts to consider turning points in stock markets and in more micro-focused or industry time series.

At the end of “Boosting Recessions” Professor Ng suggests that higher frequency data may be a promising area for research in this field.

My guess is that is true, and that, more and more, Big Data and data analytics from machine learning will be applied to larger and more diverse sets of macroeconomics and business data, at various frequencies.

This is tough stuff, because more information is available today than in, say, the 1970’s or 1980’s. But I think we know what type of recession is coming – it is some type of bursting of the various global bubbles in stock markets, real estate, and possibly sovereign debt. So maybe more recent data will be highly relevant.

financial forecasting, forecasting interest rates, macroeconomic forecasting, time series forecasting, yield curve

Interest Rates – 1

Let’s focus on forecasting interest rates.

The first question, of course, is “which interest rate”?

So, there is a range of interest rates from short term rates to rates on longer term loans and bonds. The St. Louis Fed data service FRED lists 719 series under “interest rates.”

Interest rates, however, tend to move together over time, as this chart on the bank prime rate of interest and the federal funds rate shows.

IratesFRED1

There’s a lot in this chart.

There is the surge in interest rates at the beginning of the 1980’s. The prime rate rocketed to more than 20 percent, or, in the words of the German Chancellor at the time higher “than any year since the time of Jesus Christ.” This ramp-up in interest rates followed actions of the US Federal Reserve Bank under Paul Volcker – extreme and successful tactics to break the back of inflation running at a faster and faster pace in the 1970’s.

Recessions are indicated on this graph with shaded areas.

Also, almost every recession in this more than fifty year period is preceded by a spike in the federal funds rate – the rate under the control of or targeted by the central bank.

Another feature of this chart is the federal funds rate is almost always less than the prime rate, often by several percentages.

This makes sense because the federal funds rate is a very short term interest rate – on overnight loans by depository institutions in surplus at the Federal Reserve to banks in deficit at the end of the business day – surplus and deficit with respect to the reserve requirement.

The interest rate the borrowing bank pays the lending bank is negotiated, and the weighted average across all such transactions is the federal funds effective rate. This “effective rate” is subject to targets set by the Federal Reserve Open Market Committee. Fed open market operations influence the supply of money to bring the federal funds effective rate in line with the federal funds target rate.

The prime rate, on the other hand, is the underlying index for most credit cards, home equity loans and lines of credit, auto loans, and personal loans. Many small business loans are also indexed to the prime rate. The term of these loans is typically longer than “overnight,” i.e. the prime rate applies to longer term loans.

The Yield Curve

The relationship between interest rates on shorter term and longer term loans and bonds is a kind of predictive relationship. It is summarized in the yield curve.

The US Treasury maintains a page Daily Treasury Yield Curve Rates which documents the yield on a security to its time to maturity .. based on the closing market bid yields on actively traded Treasury securities in the over-the-counter market.

The current yield curve is shown by the blue line in the chart below, and can be contrasted with a yield curve seven years previously, prior to the financial crisis of 2008-09 shown by the red line.

YieldCurve

Treasury notes on this curve report that –

These market yields are calculated from composites of quotations obtained by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The yield values are read from the yield curve at fixed maturities, currently 1, 3 and 6 months and 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 10, 20, and 30 years. This method provides a yield for a 10 year maturity, for example, even if no outstanding security has exactly 10 years remaining to maturity.

Short term yields are typically less than longer term yields because there is an opportunity cost in tying up money for longer periods.

However, on occasion, there is an inversion of the yield curve, as shown for March 21, 2007 in the chart.

Inversion of the yield curve is often a sign of oncoming recession – although even the Fed authorities, who had some hand in causing the increase in the short term rates at the time, appeared clueless about what was coming in Spring 2007.

Current Prospects for Interest Rates

Globally, we have experienced an extraordinary period of low interest rates with short term rates hovering just at the zero bound. Clearly, this cannot go on forever, so the longer term outlook is for interest rates of all sorts to rise.

The Survey of Professional Forecasters develops consensus forecasts of key macroeconomic indicators, such as interest rates.

The latest survey, from the first quarter of 2014, includes the following consensus projections for the 3-month Treasury bill and the 10-year Treasury bond rates.

SPFforecast

Bankrate.com has short articles predicting mortgage rates, car loans, credit card rates, and bonds over the next year or two. Mortgage rates might rise to 5 percent by the end of 2014, but that is predicated on a strong recovery in the economy, according to this site.

As anyone participating in modern civilization knows, a great deal depends on the actions of the US Federal Reserve bank. Currently, the Fed influences both short and longer term interest rates. Short term rates are keyed closely to the federal funds rate. Longer term rates are influenced by Fed Quantitative Easing (QE) programs of bond-buying. The Fed’s bond buying is scheduled to be cut back step-by-step (“tapering”) about $10 billion per month.

Actions of the Bank of Japan and the European central bank in Frankfurt also bear on global prospects and impacts of higher interest rates.

Interest rates, however, are not wholly controlled by central banks. Capital markets have a dynamic all their own, which makes forecasting interest rates an increasingly relevant topic.