Economic Pulse
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The short answer
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Five indicators, updated automatically each month. Consumer confidence and unemployment are the two this analysis is about; inflation, interest rates and GDP round out the picture.
Interpreting the analysis, based on every month of Federal Reserve data going back to the 1940s, not just the period shown in the charts above.
Confidence and unemployment move opposite each other. When people feel worse about the economy, unemployment tends to rise in the months that follow.
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The 12-month signal looks strongest but is the one result that fails the statistical test. The dependable window is 1 to 6 months.
Each bar shows how closely consumer confidence tracks what happened next, measured at four different lead times. Taller means a stronger relationship.
Confidence on top, unemployment below, sharing the same timeline. Click through the shift options and watch the deep confidence dip around 2008 move to the right. At "12 mo," it should land almost exactly under unemployment's own peak in late 2009: that near-year gap between the two is one concrete example of the lag this page is testing for.
Two separate panels, each with its own scale. This is deliberately not one chart with two axes, which would let the picture imply a closeness that isn't in the numbers.
Every number behind the charts, for anyone who wants to check the work.
Correlation runs from 0 (no relationship) to −1 (a perfect opposite relationship); around −0.3 to −0.4 is a moderate link. Evidence test asks a stricter question: does knowing past confidence actually improve a forecast beyond what unemployment's own history already tells you? Below 0.05 is the conventional bar for "unlikely to be coincidence." A result can score well on the first and still fail the second, which is what happens at the 12-month lead.