Blog

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The NIPI as an inflation leading indicator: what statistical evidence?

Putting the NIPI through the test, we find evidence it can have up to 3 months lead over official inflation releases in the US and Euro area.

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Newsletter. Post-COVID macro: uncertainty and volatility. Can alternative inflation data help?

Inflation may have peaked, but it is far from having normalized. A case for sticking with alternative data... and an open-mind.

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Investigating The Post-COVID Inflation Dynamics - Part I: Great Volatility?

The data shows euro area inflation volatility remains puzzingly elevated at this point, when compared with the US.

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Newsletter: Hidden Gems From Our Language Models Database

The lesser-known data in our datasets, but also: the latest on NIPI vs CPI and HICP and NewsBot App feature update.

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Not Just One Way to Look At It: Metrics From Our Inflation Datasets

Four different ways to track and analyze inflation turning points, using the quantified signals from our datasets and powerful language models.

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Three Years After: How Does the NIPI Track The Eurozone Inflation Trend?

A look at our news-based inflation diffusion index in the euro area which has still some way to go to normalize.

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Newsletter - Unleashing Language Models for Economic Insights

Language Models call for a mental shift, from trying to replicate existing data to creating new data we have never had access to before.

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Can Language Models Tackle Data Blind Spots? Introducing the "News Balance", Bespoke Inflation Series

Introducing our new inflation metrics. Not just a new model or dataset, but a whole new way of leveraging Language Models. "

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Comparing Car Price Dynamics in the US, China, the Euro area and Japan in 2023, using the News Balance

Car price dynamics have diverged in the economies in 2023. We illustrate how the News Balance can provide real-time international insights into sector-level inflation dynamics. "

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Newsletter - Past The Peak: ChatGPT Hype And Headline Inflation

What does ChatGPT change to the way we operate? And a look at Inflation Normalization progress.

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Language Models Can Track Track Food Prices In an Easing Phase Too

Language Models trained to identify inflation relevant news continue to lead US food price inflation.

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Newsletter: Is This "Normal"?

Inflation normalisation, Japan exception and Car price crash in China.

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Could Japan Inflation Dynamics Be Spiraling Out of Control?

Uniquely among G7 economies, the NIPI suggests underlying inflation is not about to slow down any time soon in Japan, as core and wages pressures continue to build up.

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Newsletter: The Inflation NewsBot Just Learnt Two New Languages!

Swedish and Polish news articles are now included in the Inflation and Wages NewsBots.

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Newsletter: What do ChatGPT and Natural Language Processing Mean For Research and Investment?

The innovation behind ChatGPT - the Transformers Language Models - are even more relevant than the specific chatbox application, because any text can be quantified now.

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Newsletter: Inflation Volatility Regime Change And Alternative Data

Today's language models are proving surprisingly reactive to the new environment. They help overcome the limitations of traditional data and models when volatility is on the rise.

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How Does Our NIPI Track Official Inflation: US Headline CPI, Sept. 2022 Release

Our inflation diffusion index based on news articles filtered by our NLP models has continued to track remarkably well headline inflation in the US.

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We Have Enhanced Our Inflation Datasets and Models to Incorporate News in Japanese!

Japanese news articles are now fully integrated in our suite of inflation monitoring data.

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Can the NIPI Identify Inflation Downturns as Well as It Has Signalled Upturns?

The NIPI has been signalling near-term inflation turning points, including the deceleration in US CPI Inflation at the start of the summer 2022.

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Loud and Clear: Combine Our NIPI (Direction) And NVI (Volume) To Spot Inflation Turning Points

We show how to combine the information from two of our timely inflation indicators to detect near-term turning points.

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Why Inflation Forecasting is So Hard? The Role of Idiosyncratic Shocks

In the short term, inflation is a collection of largely unrelated micro shocks. Natural Language Processing can help process the huge amount of information required.

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Energy Price Forecast: So Much More Than Oil Price

Energy prices dynamics can now substantially diverge from one region to the other. AMS NIPI Energy prices helps keep track of retil energy price developments in real time.

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Subdued China Inflation? Our fresh Chinese NIPI indicators provide new insights

China is far from immune to the global inflation shock

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First release of the China News Inflation Pressures Indices (NIPI)

We have compiled hundreds of thousands of news articles in Chinese to build the first ever NIPI for China.

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Beyond base effects: Eurozone NIPIs and HICP inflation momentum

To monitor inflation momentum is tricky when seasonal adjustment is an issue. Enter the NIPIs.

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The NIPI as a predictor of US inflation: Nov-2021 update

Timely catch of recent US CPI inflation turning points

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Tracking narratives to forecast food prices

Our NIPI has down a fine job tracking US food prices when compared to traditional data

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Is Euro Area Inflation at a Breakpoint?

Our new euro-area NIPI shows a marked increase in inflation pressures, within just a few weeks

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Longer-lasting "transitory"...

The overriding consensus remains that the inflation shock is transitory: is it justified or is it a failure to conceive something else than "back to previous state" post-COVID?

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Global inflation update: broader shock

Our News Inflation Pressure Indices now clearly signal a broadening of the shock, to Europe in particular

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In the news: a marked acceleration in US wage inflation

Our news tracking models have signaled a significant acceleration in US wages, since the start of 2021

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News Inflation Pressure Indices vs US CPI

A quick look back at how our NIPI signaled US CPI turning points in the last 18 months.

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The global food price upsurge: a quick look-back at our indicators

Food prices jumped at the end of last year. Check what our News Inflation pressure Index had to say back then.

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NIPI Market Signal

Comparing the News Inflation Pressure Index and Breakeven Inflation rates

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Global headline inflation upsurge

Our NIPI is at a 3y high (21-Dec-2020)

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Whose sentiment?
One or two annoying things about sentiment indicators in macro

Too often, a "sentiment" indicator is there for lack of a better word and, sometimes, of a proper thinking about the concept and goal.

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One million news project
(and counting)

That's the number of news processed by our algos to compute the News Inflation Pressure Indices (NIPIs) and News Volume Indices (NVIs). Check this post to know how the data is compiled and aggregated.

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News Inflation Pressure Index to nowcast US inflation

Our news-based indicator does track US inflation which has two interesting implications 1) the information content in our NewsBot is good and 2) we can build a whole new category of indicators aimed at nowcasting economic variables using news.

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The NewsBots models

Our approach to using language models in macro: supervised learning and specialised models.

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Food prices at the start of COVID-19 wave 2

High frequency analytics to track food prices.

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Technical Note Series: inflation classification model

We show how Natural Language Processing (NLP) can deal with rather complex tasks when given the right inputs.

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Let the robot read the news for you

Machine learning can considerably enhance information gathering, within pretty much any investment process.

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Tracking inflation news

The most important step in any Machine Learning project is to define the use case. In macro finance, inflation ticks all the boxes.