While destroy­ing the myths and biases of the plen­i­tude of long-only talking-heads seems to have been the mis­sion of Mr.Market for the last decade or so, Lak­sh­man Achuthan of ECRI does an excel­lent job of dis­miss­ing the coin­ci­dent indi­ca­tor trees for the lead­ing indi­ca­tors for­est in an inter­view with Bloomberg TV. His 'reces­sion is hap­pen­ing' call from Sep­tem­ber 30 still stands, prov­ing he does not flip flop like all other so called experts on every up or downtick in the SPY, and is expect­ing a for­mal reces­sion­ary print in GDP within three quar­ters, though not­ing that the reces­sion very likely did not start in Q3. The con­stant clam­or­ing of the con­sen­sus that we will 'mud­dle through' or that we are firm­ing in hopes we repeat the Key­ne­sian love-fest of 2009 (which he rejects as noth­ing being indica­tive of this at all) is eschewed as the man-with-the-best-name-for-anagrams-in-finance gives Tom Keene a lit­tle his­tory les­son on the foibles of minute-by-minute coin­ci­dent (or short-leading) macro data watch­ing (and prog­nos­ti­cat­ing). The ongo­ing dete­ri­o­ra­tion in the ECRI index (and lead­ing indi­ca­tors) com­bined with his not­ing that GDP tends to revise/revert towards GDI (even though the two should be the same given their either-side-of-the-same-coin nature) and the pre­vi­ous GDI print was much weaker. He ends on a less than opti­mistic note point­ing out that the pace of each eco­nomic recov­ery since the 1970s has been get­ting lower and lower and cycle volatil­ity has increased help­ing to con­firm his recession-is-happening call.

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