US Sentiment Improves
The Conference Board Leading Economic Index® (LEI) for the U.S. increased by 1.6 percent in April to 113.3 (2016 = 100), following a 1.3 percent increase in March and a 0.1 percent decline in February.
"With April's large monthly gain to start the second quarter, the U.S. LEI has now recovered fully from its COVID-19 contraction—surpassing the index's previous peak, reached at the very onset of the global pandemic in January 2020," said Ataman Ozyildirim, Senior Director of Economic Research at The Conference Board. "While employment and production have not recovered to their pre-pandemic levels yet, the U.S. LEI suggests the economy's upward trend should continue and growth may even accelerate in the near term. The Conference Board now forecasts real GDP could grow around 8 to 9 percent (annualized) in the second quarter, with year-over-year economic growth reaching 6.4 percent for 2021."
The Conference Board Coincident Economic Index® (CEI) for the U.S. increased by 0.3 percent in April to 104.1 (2016 = 100), following a 0.9 percent increase in March and a 0.7 percent decrease in February.
The Conference Board Lagging Economic Index® (LAG) for the U.S. increased by 1.8 percent in April to 104.7 (2016 = 100), following a 3.7 percent decrease in March and 2.5 percent increase in February.
The next release is scheduled for Thursday, June 17 at 10 A.M. ET.
About The Conference Board Leading Economic Index® (LEI) for the U.S.
The composite economic indexes are the key elements in an analytic system designed to signal peaks and troughs in the business cycle. The leading, coincident, and lagging economic indexes are essentially composite averages of several individual leading, coincident, or lagging indicators. They are constructed to summarize and reveal common turning point patterns in economic data in a clearer and more convincing manner than any individual component – primarily because they smooth out some of the volatility of individual components.
The ten components of The Conference Board Leading Economic Index® for the U.S. include:
Average weekly hours, manufacturing
Average weekly initial claims for unemployment insurance
Manufacturers' new orders, consumer goods and materials
ISM® Index of New Orders
Manufacturers' new orders, nondefense capital goods excluding aircraft orders
Building permits, new private housing units
Stock prices, 500 common stocks
Leading Credit Index™
Interest rate spread, 10-year Treasury bonds less federal funds
Average consumer expectations for business conditions
For full press release and technical notes:
http://www.conference-board.org/data/bcicountry.cfm?cid=1
For more information about The Conference Board global business cycle indicators:
http://www.conference-board.org/data/bci.cfm
KXCO is Enhanced Intelligence, Not Artificial
I never wanted artificial intelligence. I wanted enhanced intelligence, and they are not the same product. Artificial means the machine does the thinking and hands you the answer. Enhanced means I do the thinking, with more of my own mind in the room than I have ever had at one time. Forty years of reading, recallable in the second I need it. Patterns across law, credit, physics and markets that no specialist sees, because the useful ones sit between the fields rather than inside them.
The AI Safety Argument Is Being Held in the Wrong Room
The people who will be blamed for what AI does are not in the room where its safety is argued. A jailbreak escapes a policy. The failure that costs money is an action that escapes an owner, a payment sent or a record altered. Tokens are not authority. Intelligence got cheap and judgment did not, and there is no organ of standing you can copy into a model. Shayne Heffernan on the objection worth taking seriously, and the questions to take into a vendor meeting.
NIST Graded Our Post-Quantum Cryptography. Zero Failures.
NIST's Algorithm Validation Test System generated test vectors nobody had seen, we answered them over the ACVP protocol, and NIST graded the result: 2,130 cases across ML-KEM, ML-DSA and SLH-DSA in every parameter set offered, zero failures, demo certificate A11025. This is what that proves, where we deliberately drew the claim narrower than NIST's own matrix, and why the FIPS 140-2 sunset on 21 September makes the distinction between being graded and grading yourself worth understanding.
The Problem Is Not the Problem
People treat the Jack Sparrow line as a joke. The attribution is a joke. The sentence is not. Forty years in markets says the same thing Epictetus said in 125 CE and Robert Merton named in 1948: the event is finite, and the story you appoint to govern it is not. This essay walks the quote back to its actual sources, draws the loop that turns a feeling into an order, and sets out the four places a rule written in advance cuts the loop. Faith is not a hedge. It is a stance.
Every story, signed and delivered.
Subscribe to the kxco channel and get the headline, the AI-written key takeaways, and the chain-anchor link the moment we publish. Audio versions and per-ticker subscriptions arrive in the next iteration.