ANFCI

Most financial-conditions indices answer the question 'are conditions tight?' ANFCI answers a sharper one: are conditions tighter than the rest of the economy would predict? That distinction matters most in the regimes where this dashboard is hardest to read — supply shocks, geopolitical disruptions, fiscal events — when growth and inflation are themselves doing strange things. The raw NFCI tightens in those scenarios partly because growth is slowing and inflation is rising, signals already covered by the recession-probability, BBK, Sahm, claims, and JOLTS cards. ANFCI only tightens when financial conditions are stressed beyond what those cyclical moves alone would warrant — the financial-system signal nothing else here measures. Positive readings have led every recession since the series began in 1971 by several months; the most useful watch level isn't a hard threshold but the direction of travel: ANFCI rising while the cyclical signals are calm is the early-warning configuration, ANFCI rising in lockstep with deteriorating cyclical signals is confirmation that the financial system is amplifying the slowdown rather than absorbing it.