Macro Nowcast & Regime Clock

The Probability Desk · Regime Clock

Five live market signals — the yield curve, credit spreads, system-wide financial stress and equity volatility — read together to place the economy on a regime clock. One transparent read of where the cycle sits, for owners who hold the whole market and cannot trade their way out of it.

Source · — · as of —

Current macro regime

Easing /
Reflation Mid-cycle Late-cycle Risk-off

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Live inputs (latest observation)

How the clock is set

The clock blends four scores into one bearing: an inverted or flat curve rotates toward late-cycle/contraction; wide credit spreads, high VIX or elevated OFR stress rotate toward risk-off; easing rates with calm credit rotate toward easing/reflation.

Methodology & data sources

What this is. A research nowcast, not investment advice. It reads five public market signals and maps them to a stylised macro regime. All values are the latest observation from each free feed, embedded at build time and shown with their own observation date.

Live feeds. Yield-curve slope T10Y2Y, 10-year DGS10 and 2-year DGS2 Treasury yields, and high-yield credit spread BAMLH0A0HYM2 and equity volatility VIXCLS come from FRED keyless CSVs (fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.csv?id=…). System-wide stress is the OFR Financial Stress Index (financialresearch.gov/financial-stress-index/data/fsi.csv). FRED data are subject to revision; some series carry a short reporting lag, reflected in each input's date.

Regime thresholds (transparent). Risk-off when OFR FSI > 1, or VIX > 28, or HY spread > 5pp. Late-cycle when the curve is inverted (< 0) or near-flat (< 0.3pp) with stress contained. Easing / reflation when the curve is positively sloped (> 0.5pp), credit calm and stress below average. The dial bearing is a weighted blend of curve slope, credit spread, VIX and OFR stress, each normalised to 0–100.

For allocators. A universal owner cannot diversify away the cycle. The clock is a discipline device — a shared, source-cited read of conditions that feeds the Scenario Lab rather than a timing signal.