Business cycle signal against money supply growth
Two official monthly series on one time axis: the five-colour business cycle signal as a background band, and narrow against broad money supply growth as lines, with every crossing between them marked. The cycle signal runs from 1986 — close to forty years, and the longest continuous series on this site.
- Single stock work still runs into the macro backdrop. This is the backdrop local participants actually quote, in one page.
- The colour band and the composite score behind it are reproduced as issued: no smoothing, no rebasing, no reinterpretation.
- Every golden and death cross in the window is marked, including the ones that led nowhere. The base rate is the point.
Try it
The chart opens on the last ten years. Switch to the full history to see the cycle band alone stretch back to the mid-eighties, where money supply growth is not yet available and the lines are simply absent. Drag the zoom bar under the chart for any window in between.
How it is built
Three of these four steps are transcription. That is deliberate — on a page whose whole value is that the numbers are the official ones, the interesting work is in what is not done to them.
Take the official cycle signal as published
The government publishes a monthly business cycle signal for the whole economy: a composite score between 9 and 45 points, mapped onto five colours from cold to hot. It is reproduced here exactly as issued, with no smoothing, no rebasing and no rescaling. The monthly series runs back to 1986.
Take the two money supply growth rates as published
Narrow money (M1B) and broad money (M2) year-over-year growth come from the central bank's monetary aggregates release, again reproduced as published. Both are already stated as year-over-year percentages at source, so nothing is recomputed here.
Mark the crossings arithmetically
A golden cross is any month where M1B growth minus M2 growth turns from negative to positive; a death cross is the reverse. That is the entire rule. No lookback window, no confirmation filter, no threshold that was picked because it happened to work. Every crossing in the charted window is marked rather than a recent handful, and you can recompute the whole list from the two series alone.
Leave the gaps visible
Money supply growth is not available for every month the cycle signal covers, and the earliest stretch of the chart carries the colour band with no lines under it. A purchasing managers index is not in this site's pipeline at all, so it is absent rather than approximated. Missing is drawn as missing.
Terms
Four terms carry the page, and two of them are local vocabulary worth learning before reading anything else about this market:
Where the line is
Everything charted here is a published official figure reproduced without adjustment, which removes one class of problem and leaves another. Removed: there is no methodology of ours to audit on the levels themselves, and no way for a revision on our side to move a historical reading. Left standing: macro statistics are released with a lag and are revised after the fact, so a month near the right edge of the chart is not the same object as a month in the middle of it. The composite score is also a fixed basket whose components have not been reweighted as the economy changed shape, which is a known limitation of every long cycle indicator and is the price of having a comparable series that reaches back to 1986.
On the crossings: they are marked because they are what local participants watch, not because testing showed they predict anything. A page that only drew the crossings followed by a rally would be a much more persuasive page and a dishonest one. Several of the marked months here reversed within a quarter. That is the information, and it stays visible.
FAQ
How far back does this go?
The business cycle signal runs monthly from July 1986, which is close to forty years of continuous readings and the longest series published anywhere on this site. Money supply growth covers a shorter window and the chart simply leaves the lines absent where the data is absent.
What are the five colours, coldest to hottest?
Blue, yellow-blue, green, yellow-red, red. Blue marks a contraction, green a stable expansion, and red an overheating economy. The composite score behind the colour runs from 9 to 45 points, so two green months at 24 and 31 points are not the same reading even though they share a colour — the tooltip shows both.
Is a golden cross a buy signal?
No, and it is not published as one. It is an arithmetic description of two growth rates changing order. The chart marks every crossing in the window, including the ones followed by nothing and the ones that reversed a month later, precisely so the base rate is visible rather than curated.
Why is there no purchasing managers index here?
Because it is not in this site's data pipeline. Adding a proxy or an interpolation to make the page look more complete would be exactly the kind of quiet fabrication the rest of the site is built to avoid. When the series is ingested it will appear here and be labelled.
Do I need a key or a paid tier?
No. This is market-level data with no per-ticker component, free on the API with no signup and full history included. The endpoint takes a months parameter between 13 and 480.
Run it yourself
The free tier needs no signup — call this feature's API straight away with the demo key. Unlock as-of history and full ticker coverage on a paid tier.