The hardest game: predicting a recession

John Cook
9 min readNov 26, 2022

Originally published on frontruncrypto.com — click here to subscribe for free.

Dear frontrunners,

Happy Thanksgiving to all of frontrun’s US readers. I am grateful for the 135 new subscribers who have joined the frontrun community over the past 14 days. A pleasant surprise given the abundance of high-quality independent journalism that permeates across platforms like substack and medium.

The intersection of research across the crypto, macro, and financial markets is an in-demand and emerging space that we will continue to explore together as we front-run the next generation of wealth creation.

The first principle of this publication, and my personal north star for life, is the realization that the information you need to win is already available. Unfortunately, most people ignore it because it sounds too complicated, even though it is not.

This is why every week (starting now), we’ll share a weekly review of crypto, macro, and finance charts and attempt to assess their relevance in the broader market.

Our theme for this week is “The hardest game: predicting recessions”

Recession indicators and labor force participation

Are we in a recession? Answering this question reminds me of a childhood game Whac-a-mole. It’s an arcade game where players use a mallet to hit toy moles, which appear randomly, before returning back into their…

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