Prosperity in The Age of Decline: How to Lead Your Business and Preserve Wealth Through the Coming Business Cycles

Chapter 3Preparing for Prosperity—Good News for 2015 and 2016Do You Have Enough?

The year 2014 is a year of midterm elections, which will invariably result in myriad loud and argumentative interpretations about where the U.S. economy currently is and where it is going. The first order of business is to ignore the rhetoric. Just tune it out. Instead, pay attention to the key leading indicators we presented in Chapter 1.

We are expecting the economy's rate of growth to slow noticeably in the second half of 2014. Retailers will be complaining about lackluster Christmas sales, and job growth will be ho-hum at best. Avoid the human tendency to straight line what we expect will be lackluster economic news into the indefinite future. The sluggishness in consumer spending and in business-to-business activity should end in the second quarter of 2015. How will you know things are going to pick up in the second half of 2015? Easy: look at the following leading indicators.

It is important to find out whether you lead, lag, or are coincident to the macro environment and to determine your timing relationship to the ITR Leading Indicator and other key indicators. Knowing the timing relationship is key to the planning and implementation process. You can visit www.itreconomics.com to learn more; for our discussion here, we will assume you run essentially coincident with the general economic environment. This means you turn up and down in line with broad economic measures such as Gross Domestic ...