NPR. Predicting the economy has often been compared to the finance version of

astrology or tarot. On news channels you've got the high priests of finance

brought into prognosticate and speculate and bloviate and pontificate and

extrapolate and gesticulate and they're often wrong but you know one high priest has been right.

My name is Campbell Harvey.

I'm a professor of finance at Duke University.

And Campbell's instrument for divination,

the inverted yield curve. We've been covering the inverted yield curve.

We've been covering the inverted yield curve for years on the indicator.

Former co-host Cardiff Garcia was particularly enamored.

I am kind of obsessed with the yield curve.

I find it fascinating.

I find it mysterious.

It is one of my favorite indicators.

An inverted yield curve just means that short-term interest rates are higher than long-term interest rates.

And historically that's meant economic pain is coming.

Campbell Harvey discovered this powerful indicator decades ago, and it's predicted every recession since 1969.

Importantly, it also does not have a false signal.

Until, possibly now. The yield curve inverted almost two years ago.

We were on the lookout for a possible crash in the economy, but still no recession has the It also raises the question of whether the yield curve is still a useful prediction tool.

There are not a lot of great ways to see if a recession is coming at us.

So if the yield curve is truly dead, then our economic alert system just got a whole lot murkier.

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