Latest / Markets with Megan: A Quick Financial Markets Update / Leading Indicator Falls in 35 of 37 Months | S2 E033 | 04-21-25

Transcript

Leading Indicator Falls in 35 of 37 Months | S2 E033 | 04-21-25 · Markets with Megan: A Quick Financial Markets Update

• 0:01
  Megan Horneman: It's not surprising, with all of this economic and market volatility, that we would see another big drop in the leading indicator index.
• 0:08
  Megan Horneman: It's Monday, april 21st, and this is Markets with Megan.
• 0:11
  Megan Horneman: If you like this podcast, please subscribe.
• 0:13
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• 0:16
  Megan Horneman: But let's dig into just a piece of economic data that we got this morning, and this is one of my favorite indicators because it takes all of those different indicators that we come and report to you about, but it lumps them all into one.
• 0:29
  Megan Horneman: It is the leading indicator index, and this is for the month of March.
• 0:34
  Megan Horneman: We saw it slide again.
• 0:35
  Megan Horneman: It's down 0.7%.
• 0:37
  Megan Horneman: The expectation was it for only to be down 0.5%, and it's now been negative for 35 out of the past 37 months.
• 0:46
  Megan Horneman: Never ever in history has it happened like this, where we have not seen a recession follow.
• 0:52
  Megan Horneman: Let's dig into the details, though.
• 0:54
  Megan Horneman: The big declines in this were obviously from the consumer expectations.
• 0:58
  Megan Horneman: We've seen big drops in consumer expectations in recent months.
• 1:03
  Megan Horneman: Stock prices also detracted a lot from this index, and that's because we've seen such a big pullback here in equities and then new orders on the manufacturing side, they also dragged this index lower.
• 1:15
  Megan Horneman: Some of the other areas were credit, very slightly negative, a leading credit index and then the interest rate spread.
• 1:24
  Megan Horneman: But where we saw some positive contributions was in the jobless claims.
• 1:28
  Megan Horneman: In the average work week, remember, we haven't really seen jobless claims fall off significantly yet.
• 1:33
  Megan Horneman: And then building permits.
• 1:35
  Megan Horneman: We did see a positive contribution to the building permits.
• 1:40
  Megan Horneman: So again, not a great outlook from an economic standpoint giving this index, but we'll be back with some more information as we get it.
• 1:48
  Megan Horneman: This week there's been other headlines that are kind of really dictating what we're seeing in the markets.
• 1:54
  Megan Horneman: That's all we have and if you want a further history of our podcast, you can go to marketswithmegan.
• 1:58
  Megan Horneman: fm.
• 1:59
  Megan Horneman: Thank you.