Transform complex data into beautiful, compelling stories that inspire action
A dashboard with five well-chosen indicators can tell you more about the state of the economy than a hundred fragmented headlines. Data visualisers understand this principle instinctively: the goal is not to display everything but to display the right things in the right relationship to each other. The five macro gauges explored here — the yield curve, labour-force participation, wage expectations, productivity and the money supply — function as exactly that kind of curated signal set for anyone who needs to make sense of economic cycles.
Few data series reward visualisation as dramatically as the yield curve. Plot short-term government bond yields against long-term ones across time and you can see at a glance when the normal upward slope flattens or inverts. The yield-curve inversion signal has preceded every US recession of the past half-century by six to twenty-four months, making it one of the most consistently watched leading indicators in macroeconomics. The mechanism is intuitive: long-term bonds should yield more than short-term ones to compensate investors for tying up money and bearing uncertainty over time. When that relationship reverses, it reflects market expectations that short-term rates — driven by central bank policy — will eventually have to fall, implying the central bank itself expects growth to weaken.
Headline unemployment — the ratio of job-seekers to the workforce — is among the most widely reported economic numbers, but it has a structural weakness: it counts only people actively looking for work. When discouraged workers stop searching, they leave the denominator and the unemployment rate falls without a single new job being created. The corrective is the labor force participation rate, which measures the share of the entire working-age population that is either employed or actively job-hunting. Overlaying both series on the same chart instantly reveals when a falling unemployment rate reflects genuine hiring versus shrinking search activity — a distinction that matters enormously for monetary policy, consumer spending forecasts and talent-market planning.
Expectations are self-fulfilling in ways that most economic variables are not. When workers believe pay will rise, they negotiate accordingly; when businesses expect to grant those increases, they build them into pricing. Expectations for wage growth therefore precede actual wage movements and feed directly into inflation forecasts. Central banks track survey-based measures of wage expectations — the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta maintains a useful tracker — and visualisers who overlay these against CPI trends often see the inflation signal months before it appears in the headline print. The relationship is especially tight during tight labour markets, when workers' bargaining power amplifies the passthrough from expectations to outcomes.
Of all the macro indicators, rising labor productivity is the one most directly tied to the long-run standard of living. When output per hour worked rises, businesses can pay more without raising prices, and real wages climb sustainably. Stagnant productivity forces a choice between profit compression and price increases. Technology adoption is the primary driver: each new wave — from electrification to computing to AI — typically boosts productivity several years after initial deployment, as firms learn to reorganise work around the new capability. Productivity data also completes the story that wage expectations begin: strong productivity growth is what allows the wage spiral not to become an inflation spiral, because additional output absorbs the extra purchasing power.
The last signal in the set works at the monetary plumbing level. The M2 money supply aggregates currency in circulation, demand deposits, savings accounts and money-market fund balances — essentially, all the money that households and businesses can spend or quickly access. When M2 expands rapidly — as during pandemic-era stimulus — that extra liquidity bids up prices and asset values until supply catches up. When M2 contracts, as it did in 2022-23 in response to Federal Reserve tightening, credit conditions tighten and economic activity slows. Visualising M2 growth rate alongside the yield-curve slope reveals the two instruments the Federal Reserve controls most directly and clarifies, in a single chart, whether monetary conditions are accommodative or restrictive. Together, these five indicators form a coherent dashboard — one that shows not just where the economy is, but where it is headed.