Understanding Systems

Analyzing current housing inventory, sales volumes, and prices to predict where the market goes next. The freeze is real—sales down 33%, but prices only down 5%. What breaks the lock-in effect?

Mortgage rates track 10-year Treasury yields closely, but with a spread that fluctuates wildly. During 2008, the spread hit 3%. During QE, it compressed to 1.5%. Now it's back to 2%+. We analyze 50+ years of data to show what actually controls mortgage rates: Treasury yields, Fed policy, inflation expectations, and the MBS market.

Banks tighten lending standards 4 months before recessions on average. The Fed surveys them quarterly. Yet nobody pays attention. We test 35 years of SLOOS data and find it beats the yield curve. But there's a problem: 14 false signals since 1990. Including 2022-2023.

"Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon." Is it? We test 65 years of M2 and CPI data to find out. The correlation is -0.06. QE printed $3.5 trillion with no inflation. Then 2020-2023 printed less and got 9% inflation. What actually drives inflation if not money supply?

EPB Research claims only 3 components of GDP drive recessions. We build our own indexes from FRED data to test whether their 'Cyclical GDP' framework actually works.

The economy doesn't move as one unit—it moves in a predictable sequence. We test the Four Economy Framework against 45 years of data: does tracking Leading → Cyclical → Aggregate → Lagging economies actually predict recessions better than standard indicators? The results show why construction and manufacturing are the pulse of the business cycle, why the 2022-2025 yield curve inversion failed to predict recession, and whether you can trade profitably on the sequence.

Credit spreads—the premium investors demand for corporate debt over safe government bonds—are widely cited as recession indicators. When spreads widen, it supposedly signals rising default risk and coming economic trouble. But does this actually work? We test 45 years of credit spread data against every US recession since 1980, measuring lead times, threshold levels, false positives, and predictive accuracy. The results show spreads work differently than the yield curve—and sometimes better.

The yield curve inverted before 7 of the last 8 US recessions. But what is the yield curve, why does it invert, and how reliable is this signal? We analyze 50+ years of bond market data to understand how bonds work, what the yield curve reveals about economic expectations, and whether the inversion signal actually holds up empirically. The results show a remarkably consistent pattern—with important caveats.

Interest rate differentials, purchasing power parity, trade balances—everyone has theories about what drives currency movements. But what does the data actually show? We test seven major theories against real exchange rate data for EUR/USD, USD/JPY, and GBP/USD using regression analysis and visualizations. The results reveal which factors actually matter and which are just noise.

From gold-backed currencies to central bank digital currencies, the global financial system has been rebuilt multiple times in the past century. We trace the journey: Bretton Woods (1944), the Nixon Shock (1971), the Washington Consensus (1989), the 2008 crisis, and the emerging multipolar order. Understanding this history explains why the system works the way it does today—and where it's headed.

Who actually runs the world? An exploration of the major international organizations—UN, WHO, EU, NATO, IMF, World Bank, BIS, WTO, G20, WEF, OPEC, BRICS—their purposes, power structures, and how their decisions affect everyday life. Understanding global governance starts here.

You deposit money, they pay you 0.5% interest. They lend it out at 7%. Keep the difference. Simple, right? Not quite. Using real bank financial statements, we break down the four ways banks generate revenue, why interest spreads aren't as profitable as you think, and where banks actually make their money.

Technology, healthcare, financials, energy—everyone throws these terms around, but what do they actually mean? We break down the 11 major investment sectors, their characteristics, how they perform in different economic conditions, and why diversification across sectors matters more than most investors realize.

Why "normal" unemployment keeps changing, and what recession timing tells us about where it's headed. Implementing the Cleveland Fed's methodology reveals that the frequency of recessions—not just demographics—drives the long-run unemployment trend.

A statistical investigation using five different methods: rolling correlation, cross-correlation, Granger causality, and spectral coherence. Spoiler: the relationship exists, but it's weaker and weirder than you'd expect. Plus, we finally explain why Okun's Law doesn't jump out of the data.