How to read this site

USMacro reads the U.S. economy by fixed rules. This page shows how to read it in two minutes.

How a reading is made

Every number on the site comes from this chain. No opinion sits inside it.

Momentum — “How is the economy doing right now?”

Forward Stress — “What’s building that could break?”

Inflation Regime — “How much room does the Fed have?”

The regime (Expansion, Slowdown, Contraction, Recovery) is read from these gauges by fixed thresholds.

A colour is where an indicator sits against its own history. It is never a prediction.

An example of the idea, not today’s data.

When the economy looked like this before, what happened next? We count it and show you the count. We don’t predict.

Today’s pages read the latest data. The Time Machine and the Regimes page read what was known on the day, because figures get revised later.

indicator — One public economic series the site tracks (payrolls, a yield spread, a survey), with its own page and its own color rule.
gauge — One of the three State of the Economy composites: a weighted blend of indicators, each ranked within its own history, read on one common scale where higher means healthier.
regime — The stage of the cycle the gauges name each month by fixed rules: Expansion, Slowdown, Contraction or Recovery.
band — One range of an indicator’s values with one color and one word.
first published — The value a figure carried on the day it first came out, before any revision; the site keeps those values.
revision — A later change to a figure already published; the Revisions Ledger measures how far first prints miss.
Time Machine — The heatmap on a past date: every cell as it was known that day, not as revised since.
breadth — How much of the economy is moving the same way: the count of indicators improving against those worsening.
period — The months a reading stays at one level.
episode — A period that a rule opens and closes, so it can be counted.