Recessions get all the attention, but the harder — and more useful — question is when things turn up. This explorer gathers the indicators that lead the business cycle in both directions, for the major economies. Switch views, press play, and watch each one bend before the turn.
Sources: OECD Composite Leading Indicators (leading indicator, business & consumer confidence — amplitude-adjusted, ~100 = long-run trend) via the OECD SDMX API; FRED T10Y3M (10yr − 3mo Treasury spread) and RECPROUSM156N (smoothed US recession probability); OECD Quarterly National Accounts (real GDP — quarterly, seasonally adjusted volumes; China omitted for lack of a clean quarterly series), retrieved Aug 2026 · tip: switch views above, click a country to isolate it, zoom to recent years.
A first-draft write-up — the data and charts are real; the words are a starting point to make your own.
The unemployment rate tells you where the economy was. To see where it's going — in either direction — you need leading indicators: the series that bend before output does. This piece pulls together several of the most useful, for the world's major economies, alongside GDP itself — the output they're all trying to anticipate.
The OECD's CLI is purpose-built for this. It bundles new orders, confidence, financial and other forward-looking inputs into one index, amplitude-adjusted so that 100 is the long-run trend. The rule of thumb is simple and symmetric: above 100 and rising means expansion; a peak above 100 warns of a slowdown; a trough below 100 that turns up signals recovery. Because it's standardized, you can lay the US, Canada, Germany, Japan and China on the same axis and compare who's turning first.
The next two views separate business and consumer confidence. They don't always move together, and the gaps are informative — businesses often sense a turn in orders before households feel it in their paycheques. Both are symmetric: they sag before downturns and lift before recoveries.
Everything above is trying to anticipate one thing — real GDP, the actual volume of what an economy produces. Two views put it on the board directly. GDP growth plots the year-over-year change: above the green line output is expanding, below it the economy is shrinking. The COVID trough and the recessions of the early 1990s and 2008–09 are unmistakable, and you can see who fell hardest and who bounced back first.
GDP (indexed) rebases each economy to 100 at the end of 2019, just before the pandemic, so every line reads against its pre-COVID level — the long climb up to it, the pandemic drop, and how far each has clawed back since. It's the cleaner way to compare recoveries: the US sits well above its pre-COVID level while Germany has spent years essentially flat — the stagnation that dominates its own economic debate. All of it is quarterly, seasonally adjusted, and in volume (inflation-stripped) terms. China is left out here: it doesn't publish a clean, continuous quarterly series on the same basis, and stitching one together would quietly break the like-for-like comparison the rest of the chart depends on.
The last two views are US-only, because that's where the data is deep enough to trust:
No single indicator calls every turn. The point of a dashboard isn't one perfect signal — it's watching several bend the same way at once.
Turning messy public data into a monitoring tool you can actually read is exactly the kind of thing I do.