Macro-financial regime comparator

A single regime label — “Slowdown”, “Inflationary Pressure” — can cover opposite financial conditions. Comparing two real months, indicator by indicator, makes visible what the label alone hides.

Rather than averaging a regime into a profile, the tool sets two real months against each other: the figures shown are the published values, each one verifiable.

How to read the comparison

Each column describes one month. At the top sits that month’s classified regime, then its three axes put into words: growth (measured by the Chicago Fed’s CFNAI), underlying inflation (the Dallas Fed’s Trimmed Mean PCE) and financial conditions (the Chicago Fed’s NFCI). Below come the numeric drivers — policy rate, 10y − 2y curve slope, the twelve-month change in oil, volatility, the dollar — as they stood that month.

Beneath each value in column B, an A → B gap gives the figure difference between the two moments. It is a measure, not a verdict: the tool never says one period is “better” than another. When a series wasn’t yet published for an older month — the broad dollar before 2006, for instance — the cell shows “n/d” rather than a reconstructed value. The label colours follow the regime’s inflation column: they describe a state, not portfolio favourability.

What a “classified regime” measures

The displayed regime belongs to the cyclical layer of Eco3min’s classification: a growth × inflation grid that sorts each month into one of seven states — from balanced expansion to stagflation — plus a transition state. The verdict is reproducible: it follows from two measured axes and a versioned thresholds table, whose number appears at the foot of the tool. The inflation measure is underlying inflation, which excludes energy: a transitory oil shock therefore does not move the inflation axis — something the classification separately flags as a divergence between headline and underlying inflation.

This is where the comparison illuminates the mechanism. The 2008 trough and the 2020 shock are both classified “Slowdown” — growth below trend, inflation near target. Yet financial conditions were in acute stress in late 2008 (NFCI above 2.4) and stayed neutral in April 2020, as the Federal Reserve’s backstop compressed funding stress almost immediately despite the collapse in activity. Same label, opposite conditions. For the grid itself, see the regime classification methodology and, for the present reading, the current macro regime.

The limits: two snapshots don’t make a rule

A snapshot describes two months, no more. The classification is monthly, and some regimes have only one or two episodes since 2003: a single month is therefore not the “profile” of its regime. Comparing two moments shows how the same axes produce different conditions; it does not prejudge the next regime and prescribes no decision. The grid’s high-inflation columns are grouped under inflationary macro regimes, their mirror under disinflationary macro regimes.

Last updated — 1 June 2026