Charts of the Year: 2023’s most popular visualisations, Part I
This week's chart covers the following topics:
Our bearish “nowcasts” for US GDP
Nowcasts offer an early glimpse under the hood of an economy, given the time lag before governments release traditional datasets. In this case, our nowcast was wrong-footed by the resilience of the US economy.
This nowcast – the first of several we published in 2023 – estimated US gross domestic product in real time. It used industrial production, business surveys, financial market data and more to feed Macrobond’s built-in principal component analysis and vector autoregression model.
We’ve overlaid actual GDP data (in blue) on top of the green nowcast line. As you can see from the January 2023 datapoint on our chart, the nowcast called for a sharp growth slowdown that stopped short of a contraction. Instead, GDP growth accelerated.
Some 11 months later, our nowcasting model is again predicting deceleration to start the year. Will it be more accurate this time, given the Federal Reserve has finally “pivoted” and indicated it’s worried about overtightening?
Geopolitical risk perceptions: Ukraine and Gaza from Germany to the US
In February 2023, almost a year after Russia invaded Ukraine, we thought it apt to compare this event to previous geopolitical shocks. We used a measure of perceived risk generated by Economic Policy Uncertainty, an academic group that tracks newspaper headlines.
Our “bubbles on a string” attempt to visualise the level of concern about various events in different countries. In the US, for instance, nothing compares to 9/11 as a moment of perceived maximum risk. For Germans, whose economy was so linked to Russian natural gas, the invasion of Ukraine caused much more worry.
US small business was – and is – worried about credit conditions
The National Federation of Independent Business surveys smaller US enterprises about their expectations for access to credit in the near term.?
Our chart shows how the results of this sentiment survey – pushed one year ahead – can be a leading indicator for US bankruptcy filings. Bankruptcies slid to a multi-decade low during the pandemic due to state support programs, but have been creeping higher.
We first published this chart in April, when worries about a credit crunch were exacerbated by the failure of Silicon Valley Bank and other small lenders.
The second pane more directly expresses the “net balance” of the NFIB survey on a six-month time horizon. As the Fed moves to “pivot” to looser policy, survey respondents are slightly less pessimistic than they were eight months ago.?
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Macrobond News
The Macrobond community is giving its forecasts for 2024
With the new year around the corner, our customers are providing their outlooks for the global economy.
Check out our latest data additions.
Can’t get enough charts? Usama Karatella and Meghna Shah take you through the newest time series added to the Macrobond universe. They highlight data detailing:
And more than 30 other streams of information, from South Africa to Japan.
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Got a suggestion for an innovative visualisation or interesting subject matter? Write to us at [email protected].
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