WHO WE ARE:
The Curb Economist is an independent research firm using data and statistics from publicly traded companies as inputs for macroeconomic analysis of the US economy. Instead of using "soft" survey based data to analyze things like retail sales, GDP, etc., we use "hard" data from publicly traded firms.
WHAT WE OFFER:
We publish proprietary research analyzing the macroeconomy at large, as well as different elements and components of it. We use the data and statistics provided in publicly traded firm filings as our inputs for assessing things like aggregate demand, wage and cost inflation, employment, and many other items critical to formulating an understanding of what's actually happening in the US economy. Below is an example of one of our products: our Public Company US Economic Key Performance Indicator (KPI) Heat Map, as well as an accompanying chart of a Diffusion Index.
PUBLIC COMPANY US ECONOMIC KPI HEAT MAP
Last Updated: 12/17/25
WHO SHOULD SUBSCRIBE AND WHY?
ECONOMISTS
The Curb Economist uses hard data from publicly traded companies that few other economists use. We aggregate the micro to help you assess and forecast the macro. Whether it's to help you build your economic models or to help you make overall evaluations of the American economy, TCE can be either a foundational building block for your analysis or a supplemental one.
INVESTORS
As former institutional investors ourselves, we understand investors are in the business of making money. How can we help you do that? Ultimately, you have to know what's happening with the economy in order to make educated investment decisions, and that is just as true for hedge funds as it is private equity firms. By using more reliable data coming directly from businesses themselves, we can help you figure out what kind of market we're in faster and more reliably than other economists.
​
We stress that The Curb Economist isn't just for Institutional Investors though. Professional investors often have resource advantages that individual investors don't, chief among them sell-side Wall Street firms with their own economic forecasters. TCE is here to help fill that void for retail investors by providing the kind of macroeconomic research and analysis you always wanted but didn't think you could afford.
BUSINESSES
Companies and businesses are investors too, and probably our most important kind. They are constantly making decisions about how to allocate their precious resources. Whether it's to evaluate whether or not now is a good time to take on that new project, expand your workforce, or to supplement your in-house economist's dataset, The Curb Economist can play a valuable role in growing and expanding your business, whether you're a small LLC or a large corporation.
THINK TANKS
Think Tanks don't always get the credit they deserve, but as principle research institutions, Think Tanks help us all advance our knowledge and capabilities, both as individuals and as a society. Either directly or indirectly, economics ultimately drive most of what happens in society, so good economic research is an imperative input for the researchers of today to become the thought leaders of tomorrow.
GOVERNMENTS
Governments need economists just as much as anybody else, and we as citizens have a vested interest in making sure governments have good economic research to make informed decisions about taxing and spending. The Curb Economist can be the bedrock for these foundational elements. Whether it's to help you figure out what might happen with your tax base, whether you should take on a new infrastructure project, upgrade software or other technology, or expand your payrolls, TCE research can help you make prudent decisions with your taxpayers' resources.
DID WE HAVE A RECESSION IN 2023? WE THINK SO
To this point, most economists do not think we had a recession in 2023. This is one of many areas where we differ. Using aggregated data from publicly traded companies as our foundation, we think we had a "job-loss-less" recession in 2023, where real GDP, investment and retail sales all went negative on a year-over-year basis (almost regardless of which inflation measure you used), but job losses never transpired. Consider the following charts:
Government economic data, however, paints a different picture of this period, with GDP, investment and retail sales growth all remaining more robust. For more on this topic, see our PDF by clicking the button below.
ARE ECONOMISTS OR THE STOCK MARKET BETTER AT PREDICTING RECESSIONS?
In a 1966 Newsweek article, MIT Economist Paul Samuelson famously quipped that "the stock market has predicted nine out of the last five recessions." He was right that the stock market has a tendency to over-predict recessions, but Samuelson's remark, which was meant to defend economists and be an insult to the market's predictive powers, left out important context: as opposed to who, or what?
Since 1965, if we use declines of 15-20% in the S&P500 as a barometer for an impending recession, the stock market's "hit rate" for recession prediction is about 50-60%. If we use 25% declines as the threshold, the market's predictive powers rise to 67%. If we go all the way to 30% declines, the market's hit rate is 83%. Samuelson's claim then was too simplistic. It depends on what you use as a threshold that matters.
Economists on the other end, rarely actually predict recessions, and as the first chart below shows (of the Phila Fed's Anxious Index), it's rare for them to predict recessions even when we're in the middle of one. While they do usually ultimately see their optimism subdued when recessions are occurring, they are almost always late to the party, and typically only call recession a 50/50 shot once it's almost over. This makes their collective forecasts far less valuable for investing or policymaking. While economists tend to have disdain for the market because it moves its forecasts around more than they do, they are ignoring its signals at their own peril. It's for this reason that we think our research can be an important compliment to economists' existing processes. For more on this subject, see our note here.
​
How does this relate to The Curb Economist? Stock market investors are largely reacting to announcements and guidance from publicly traded companies to make their forecasts about the future. Declines in reported results and reductions in guidance for future results are real-time indicators investors use to sniff out economic weakness. We at The Curb Economist use this as our primary data input, and can therefore use the signals the stock market is sending to help predict the current and future state of the economy better and sooner than other economists.
