by Menzie Chinn New aggregate indicators on the macroeconomy are out. How do they compare against a summary measure of the macro series the NBER BCDC focus on? A week ago, Macroeconomic Advisers released their estimate of April GDP, while e-Forecasting released their estimate of May GDP. These two series are depicted in Figure 1. Recall that the NBER BCDC examines four other variables to gauge economic activity: payroll employment, industrial production, real manufacturing and trade sales, and real personal income less transfers [1]. To see how GDP has moved differently from these other measures of economic activity, see this post. Rather than providing a welter of series, I’ve tried to summarize the movement in these four variables by generating an index that is the first principal component of the four underlying series (all logged). This is the blue line in Figure 1. Figure 1: First ...