ECRI Weekly Leading Index continues to improve

The recovery from the recession continues to poke along a bit too slowly for most people, but at least the trend is still positive. The Economic Cycle Research Institute (ECRI) Weekly Leading Index (WLI) continues to be relatively weak, but also continues to show incremental improvement, rising moderately this week, to 123.8 from 122.5, and the WLI annualized growth rate rose moderately, to -7.0% from -7.8, moderately above the psychologically important -10.0% level that some pundits (but not ECRI) view as the threshold for a recession. The bottom line is that the WLI has remained roughly flat since the beginning of July. That is not great, but this is at least not a worsening of the outlook. The much-feared double-dip recession is being kept at bay.

As ECRI put it two weeks ago, "After a brief plunge in the late spring, the WLI has been fairly stable throughout the summer and into September, suggesting that it is still premature to predict a new recession."

The WLI is well below its peak in April, and modestly lower than the level of a year ago (129.3) when the recovery was just getting underway in earnest.

We had a massive bulge of stimulus, which peaked and is now somewhat dissipated. The big negative WLI growth rate is simply telling us that we are well down from that peak bulge. If the WLI were to deteriorate significantly further from here for a couple of months, that would be a problem, but  we're not headed in that direction at the present time.

The WLI suggests that the economy is likely to slow a bit further, but as of this week a double-dip recession is still not in the cards from the WLI perspective. Still, the outlook does remain, as Ben Bernanke has said, "unusually uncertain."

-- Jack Krupansky