John Hussman summarizes quite well the scale and breadth of economic decline in recent months:
"With industrial production, capacity utilization,
real disposable income, real personal consumption, real sales retail
and food service sales, and real manufacturing and trade sales
uniformly declining in their latest reports, coincident economic
indicators – having generally peaked in July – are now following
through on the weakness that we’ve persistently observed in leading
economic measures. We continue to believe that the U.S. economy joined a
global economic downturn during the third quarter of this year.
"While we use a broad range of signal extraction
and noise-reduction methods in our own work, the economic data in
recent months has required less and less sophisticated analysis, as
many of the most reliable leading economic measures have turned clearly
lower (e.g. Philly Fed Index, Chicago Fed National Activity Index, and
the new orders and order backlog components of numerous regional and
national Federal Reserve and purchasing managers surveys)." -- John Hussman, PhD. Dec. 4, 2012
