Stock and Watson looked at 270 economic series, accounted for measurement error, and plotted the likelihood of recession derived from each one with historical data (not all series are there for all observations).
The recessions are the vertical red bands – where just about everything is showing recessionary behavior.
The series run down the vertical axis. The horizontal axis is in months from January 1959. The data ends in the summer of 2007 – so don’t look for a green patch on the right.
Their goal here is to get away from the contemporary method of dating business cycles on the basis of a handful of aggregate measures, and instead use the original method of Burns and Mitchell in the 1920’s – to look at large variety of disaggregated data.
