Right now, the economy is all over the place. And when things get confusing, we look to basic economic indicators to help explain what's going on. Today, we're bringing you two episodes of our daily show The Indicator that focus on the bond market. The market for U.S. treasury bonds is generally safe, predictable and pretty boring. Recently, though, it's been anything but. We look into the fluctuations in bond prices and the yield curve (one of our favorite indicators) to try to help us understand where the economy stands right now. These two Indicator episodes were originally produced by Brittany Cronin and Noah Glick. They were fact-checked by Sierra Juarez and engineered by Gilly Moon and Katherine Silva. Kate Concannon edits The Indicator. The Planet Money version was produced by Dylan Sloan and edited by Dave Blanchard. Music: "Funk Lounge," "A Fulltime Job" and "Velvet Groove." Help support Planet Money and get bonus episodes by subscribing to Planet Money+ in Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/planetmoney. Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices NPR Privacy Policy
This is planet Money from NPR.
The economy is in a confusing place.
There are some pretty troubling signs, including the most recent collapse of several banks and also inflation remaining stubbornly high.
But then there are things like consumer spending, which continues to be strong.
And in uncertain economic times like these, we go back to our bread and butter economic indicators, and some of the best indicators can be found in one of the biggest financial marketplaces in the world, with countless bets being placed minute by minute by traders scrutinizing every economic data point and every utterance by policymakers.
That is the market for us government bonds.
And right now, the signals from the bond market are flashing in a strange, mysterious way.
Hello, and welcome to Planet Money.
I'm Darian woods.
Today on the show, we're going to bring you two episodes of our daily economics podcast, the Indicator, both looking at what these strange signals from the bond market telling us.
We've got a story on a big recession indicator, the yield curve, and a story on how normally safe and secure treasury bonds can turn ugly.
After the break, Adrian, Ma, and I will head off on our explorations of the bond market, starting with the yield curve.
Of all the economic indicators, there is one that has predicted every recession since 1969 with no false positives.
That is a remarkable track record of economic doom predicting.
We're talking about the yield curve.
The yield curve, that's right.
We talk about it a lot on this podcast.
And the yield curve is flashing red right now.
It's going alert, alert.
I call that code red.