FIBER monitors the trends and major fluctuations in economic growth, inflation, interest rates and financial markets in key economies around the world. We provide business and financial managers as well as planners and policy makers with indexes unavailable from any other source. The selection of indicators and composite indexes is based on the unique methodology developed in a long series of studies that first originated at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). These tools are used to identify turning points and inflection points in the economy, and as such are essential for informed business and financial decision-making.

Essentially, we analyze global economic recessions and recoveries in U.S. and abroad along with directional changes in inflation cycles using long leading, short leading, and coincident indexes.

The following are some details about our proprietary indexes:

Our Coincident Index is a composite time series that represents the most recent state of the economy covered by the available data, including, in particular, the monthly series on employment, real sales, personal income and industrial production. This index provides a monthly representation of total economic activity which is approximately comparable to quarterly real GDP (alternatively, the latter series can be interpolated monthly and included in the index).

Our Leading Index is a composite time series that has a strong tendency to lead the coincident index by several months thus revealing the direction in which the economy is going. A Short Leading Index is distinguished from the Long Leading Index for a number of major economies. A Short Leading Index includes such series as the average workweek, new orders and stock prices, which have an average lead of four to six months.

Our Long Leading Index includes residential building permits or starts, price to unit labor cost ratio, corporate profit margins, bond prices and yield spreads. It may lead roughly twice as long as the Short Leading Index, providing a forecast for up to one year in advance.

Our Leading Inflation Index is a composite of individual indicators which tend to lead the inflation cycle by several months. This index has proven more reliable than any other harbinger of inflation when used in conjunction with other FIBER proprietary indexes.

Since there are variations in the length of their leads from cycle to cycle, it is important to monitor each of the component indicators continually and the composite indexes on a month-to-month basis in order to obtain early warnings of inflation pressures, recessions and recoveries.

We specialize in the following fields:

• Global Macroeconomics: Forecasting turning points in business cycles, growth, and inflation
• Global Financial Markets: Top-down analysis of equity, fixed income, commodity, and currency markets