How we read the economy

Operational macro: fiscal flows, Federal Reserve and Treasury operations, and balance-sheet mechanics, read daily and in that order.

The series we maintain

Daily Treasury Statementdaily · T+1since 2013350,000+ line items

Monthly Treasury Statementmonthlysince 1974full fiscal decomposition

Margin debt · FINRAmonthlysince 1996member-firm statistics

Investor sentiment · AAIIweeklysince 19872,000+ survey weeks

Markets & ratesdailysince 2001S&P closes, vol surface, policy rates

Schedules are the data’s own — the DTS lands at 4:00 PM ET for the prior day, AAII prints Thursdays, FINRA weeks after the month it measures. Every dashboard states, series by series, exactly how fresh it is.

The accounting

Every dollar of deficit is a surplus somewhere else — to the dollar.

That is not a theory; it is accounting. The framework starts from sectoral balances and stays stock-flow consistent the whole way down: every flow lands on a balance sheet, every position has to be financed. The lens comes out of the Modern Monetary Theory tradition, applied strictly as a description of how the monetary system operates — never as a policy agenda.

The two circuits

One spender has no limit. The other has a ceiling.

Vertical · fiscalGovernment spending adds net financial assets to the private sector — and, by the accounting, ends up as its profits. A policy choice, with no inherent limit.

Horizontal · creditBanks create money by lending — loans create deposits. Credit can carry markets when fiscal wanes, but it has a ceiling: growth demands acceleration, and deceleration at a debt peak is how expansions end.

The regimes that hurt are the ones where both circuits contract at once — 2000, 2008, 2022. Reading the two together, every day, is the discipline the rest of this page builds on.

The daily read

The checkbook of the largest actor in the system, read every evening.

The Daily Treasury Statement lands at 4:00 PM ET, reporting the previous day’s actual settlements. Four things get read the same evening:

TGA balancewhat is about to happen to bank reserves

Withheld taxesthe real-time wage bill — nominal growth weeks before the surveys

Gross outlaysspending as it actually settles, not as budgeted

Settlement calendarthe issuance dealers will have to absorb, and when

All of it is public. The edge is not the feed — it is the reading, done every day, inside one consistent framework.

From flow to position

If we cannot draw the chain from the print to the position, we do not publish the trade.

1The flow prints — a settlement, not a survey.

2The balance-sheet effect follows mechanically: reserves, deposits, collateral.

3Someone is forced to act — dealers, banks, corporates, leveraged investors.

4The position is the implication, written only when the mechanism is explicit end to end.

Heavy issuance into a thin reserve backdrop is a different market than the same issuance into an ample one. The chain is the discipline.

The model layer

Eight models, each deliberately narrow.

Each exists to sharpen a single decision — long, short, or in cash. A series that does not improve that decision does not get a model, and no flow series feeds one until it has shown real information content against noise controls and forecast value under Granger causality.

Flow / SentimentweeklyDivergences between Treasury cash flows and investor sentiment — deviation, momentum, trend. Pinned to the AAII release, stamped for the week it applies to, never backfilled.

Flow Phasewalk-forwardA three-phase classifier in the Minsky tradition, mapping debt and deficit dynamics onto equity regimes: distress, neutral, expansion. Never sees the period it is scored on.

Vol Shiftnext sessionClassifies the magnitude of the next session’s S&P move from the variance risk premium, dealer-positioning proxies, contango, and the VIX term structure.

DeepMMTregressionA deep-learning regression over roughly forty-five engineered flow features, sketching the S&P’s forward path implied by current flows. Read as a shape, not a target: it exaggerates moves by construction, and we say so.

DeepMMT 2scenariosFive scenario runs ordered by business confidence, weighted into central paths with 68% and 95% bands — total-market equity, real GDP, inflation, and unemployment on one framework.

PulseGDPnowcastA weekly estimate of real GDP assembled from roughly forty indicator series as they land. The estimate walks as data arrives — and the walk is the signal.

Quad Frameworkregime mapInflation crossed with growth, z-scored into four regimes — where the mix has been, where the scenario path heads next, and how the model would tilt within each quadrant.

DeepMinskyin developmentA multi-sector system-dynamics model — households, firms, banks, Treasury, central bank, foreign sector — with credit cycles emerging endogenously: hedge, speculative, Ponzi.

Where this livesOn the dashboards, inside the research notes, and in the weekly analyst office hours — where you can ask us why.

The flow models retrain every morning after the day’s inputs land — the dateline on every page says which statement the current signals were trained on; the scenario, nowcast, and regime models update on the cadences stated above. We run scenarios, not point forecasts. Institutional readers can request the DeepMinsky whitepaper.

What we do not claim

Research, not a track record.

No equilibrium assumptionsthe system is flows, not a resting point

No certainty sold as suchmodel output is labelled model output

No performance claimsevery live figure carries its source and date

No dressed-up cadencesa weekly signal is presented as weekly

When we are wrong, the framework is the tool we use to find out why.

“We trade the plumbing, not the politics.”

Read the research → See the dashboards →

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See the framework at work

The free updates apply it to live flows — occasional, sent when the flows warrant it.

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