Economic Indicator发表评论(0)编辑词条

What Does Economic Indicator Mean?
A piece of economic data, usually of macroeconomic scale, that is used by investors to interpret current or future investment possibilities and judge the overall health of an economy.  Economic indicators can potentially be anything the investor chooses, but specific pieces of data released by government and non-profit organizations have become widely followed - these include:

- The Consumer Price Index (CPI)
- Gross Domestic Product (GDP)
- Unemployment figures
- The price of crude oil

Explains Economic Indicator
An economic indicator is only useful if one interprets it correctly. History has shown strong correlations between economic growth (as measured by GDP) and corporate profit growth. However, determining whether a specific company will grow its earnings based on one indicator is nearly impossible. Indicators give us signs along the road, but the best investors will utilize many economic indicators, looking for patterns and verifications within different sets of data.

Most economic indicators have a specific schedule for release, allowing investors to prepare for and plan on seeing certain information at certain times of the month and year.

An economic indicator (or business indicator) is a statistic about the economy. Economic indicators allow analysis of economic performance and predictions of future performance.

Economic indicators include various indices, earnings reports, and economic summaries, such as unemployment, housing starts, Consumer Price Index (a measure for inflation), industrial production, bankruptcies, Gross Domestic Product, broadband internet penetration, retail sales, stock market prices, and money supply changes. Economic indicators are primarily studied in a branch of macroeconomics called "business cycles". The leading business cycle dating committee in the United States of America is the National Bureau of Economic Research.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics is the principal fact-finding agency for the U.S. government in the field of labor economics and statistics. Other producers of economic indicators includes the United States Census Bureau and United States Bureau of Economic Analysis.

Economic indicators fall into three categories: leading, lagging and coincident.

Coincident indicators are those which change at approximately the same time and in the same direction as the whole economy, thereby providing information about the current state of the economy. Personal income, GDP, industrial production and retail sales are coincident indicators. A coincident index may be used to identify, after the fact, the dates of peaks and troughs in the business cycle.