Unfortunately, the lesson of several decades’ effort on creating indicators is that there’s really no substitute for knowing what you’re talking about, and there isn’t a statistical ...

Another recession indicator: sales of cardboard boxes. The basic idea is that companies ship and sell products in boxes. If box sales drop, it could mean the economy is tanking.

Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, once hypothesized that a drop in men's underwear sales is a sign of a recession. As former NPR correspondent Robert Krulwich reported ...