Yield Curve Continues to Trend Toward Inverting – Strong Indicator of Recession

Yesterday The New York Times published an article titled, “What’s the Yield Curve? ‘A Powerful Signal of Recessions’ Has Wall Street’s Attention” (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/25/business/what-is-yield-curve-recession-prediction.html). If you have the time, it is worth a read because the author, Matt Phillips, discusses the importance of the yield as a predictor of recessions. As I have discussed in at least one previous blog post, the yield curve is one of the best indicators of recessions. As Phillips notes, “every recession of the past 60 years has been preceded by an inverted yield curve, according to research from the San Francisco Fed.”

The graph below shows the yield curve through June 25, 2018. The gray bars indicate recessions, so the relationship between the inversion of the yield curve and recessions is pretty clear. It is also pretty clear that the yield curve is trending toward flattening (i.e., approaching zero in the graph). As noted in the article, the inversion of the yield curve does not give much of an indication of when the recession will occur, except that it will be in the fairly near future. As I have mentioned before, I think we will see the U.S. economy dip into recession by late 2019 at the earliest or sometime in 2020.