Failure to Launch
The year 2014 began with a clear consensus that the economy was "taking off" and would soon reach "escape velocity." We disagreed.
So, we said in January on CNBC: “What’s bothersome is that right now the consensus is that we are 'taking off,' we are approaching ‘escape velocity’ ... We just don’t see that when we’re looking at the data... in the forward-looking indicators, in the coincident data on jobs, it’s not there.”
It is now quite clear that the economy is decelerating, not accelerating, with growth in ECRI's Weekly Coincident Index (see chart) falling rapidly.