FWIW, you can buy a kilogram of CBD here for $550 That works out to 2,667 doses at 20 cents per dose. So not as bad as you might be thinking.

The "will we/won't we have a recession" indicator is pointing solidly towards "we will". That said, signs are a recession will be relatively mild since it's "artificially" created by the Fed rather than a normal business cycle recession. I'm more concerned about the recovery than the recession, as I suspect it is likely to be slow and painful.

Tools: RStudio

Data: FRED (current/historical bond yields and Fed rate), MarketWatch (up-to-the-minute bond yields), Robert Shiller (historical 10 year bond yields)

R Source: https://github.com/MetricT/R_Code/blob/main/EconFinance/Yield_Curve_Minidash.R

I have previously posted a graph that shows both the number of inverted yield curves as well as the mean yield spread across all durations. I have found that those measures avoid a false positive/negative or two that affect the traditional 10y/2y and 10y/3mo yield curve spreads. Which makes sense. The latter are only looking at one particular yield spread, while the former are looking at inversions along the entire yield curve, and do a better job of capturing the overall distortion of the yield curve at a given time.

You can see in the top graph that the yield curve is "see-sawing". Long-term yields are falling as Smart Money rushes to lock in their investments over the long term before a recession gets here. Short-term yields are rising since fewer people are buying them. The yield curve is "humped" but not yet inverted, but at the rate it's shifting, there's a good chance it will invert early in 2023.

The middle graph shows the average yield spread across all Treasury maturities, compared to the more common 10y/2y and 10y/3mo spreads. I've left it off this dashboard, but when the average yield curve goes "red", the Fed has historically instantly stopped raising rates, except during the high-inflation 70's. So it'll be interesting to see what they do this time.

The bottom shows the percent of all yield spread combinations that are inverted. Today there are 11 Treasury maturities (1mo, 3mo, 6mo, 1yr, 2yr, 3yr, 5yr, 7yr, 10yr, 20yr, 30yr), though the exact number has changed over time. A little math shows that 11 maturities yields 55 different yield spread combinations, though again the exact number has changed over time. Graphing the percent that are inverted helps offer a apples-to-apples comparison across time, and highlights times (like now) when the yield curve is highly distorted.

I promised that I would try to find time to post the script source by the end of the year, so Merry Christmas! It runs fine on my Linux RStudio Server and Windows RStudio, so hopefully it will run on your computer too.

Tools: RStudio, Google Trends

I suspected that Google searches for "food bank" would be a good recession indicator, and it seems to be so. In 2008, 2020, and unfortunately again in 2022 we see substantial increases in searches for food banks.

There is a strong seasonal component that I graphed in the inset. People do a lot more searching for food banks around the major family holidays (Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter, though strangly not the 4th of July).

I'm curious why searches rose and then fell back during the 2020 recession, but not following the 2008 recession. It's possible that it's due to technical factors (more people using the internet over the years, or the data not being normalized), but it looks like a lot of people who were forced to hit up food banks after 2008 weren't able to get back off them.