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Even More LEI silliness

An emailer (who insists on anonymity) asks: "Aren't you done Bitch-slapping the Conference Board yet?"

Umm, no.

We've addressed this twice recently. Today, I'm going to hand the micropohone over to Bob Bronson, who makes an extremely compelling argument that we haven't highlighted the utter dishonest foolishness of what the Conference Board  has wrought enough:

Without the revision eliminating the bearish impact of a narrowing yield curve the Conference Board's composite of leading economic indicators would have been down in July, rather than up a meager 0.1%.

But even with this revision, the other five leading economic indicators, which are coincident with the stock market, are below their highs oflast year and/or this year.  Most significantly, they are rolling over again,as illustrated in the chart below.

Here's the chart:

click for enormously large chart

graphic courtesy of Bronson Capital Markets Research

>

Sources:
The Conference Board Removed the Bearish Impact of the Flattening Yield Curve From Their Leading Economic Indicators, But...
Bob Bronson
Bronson Capital Markets Research, August 2, 2005
http://www.financialsense.com/editorials/bronson/2005/0802.html

U.S. LEADING ECONOMIC INDICATORS AND RELATED COMPOSITE INDEXES FOR JUNE 2005
The Conference Board U.S. Business Cycle Indicators, 10:00 A.M. ET, THURSDAY, JULY 21, 2005
Conference Board Changes to LEI  (PDF)
http://www.conference-board.org/economics/bci/RevisionsLEI_2005.pdf

Thursday, August 25, 2005 | 08:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
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Comments

What about the ECRI WLI that is showing a nice bullish run? Maybe the Conference Board is just trying to get their index to look like ECRIs. Give them some slack ! Everyone loves a bull.

Posted by: bigfoot | Aug 25, 2005 11:00:10 PM