2,793 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
An economic barometer can indicate where an economy stands without reliably telling when it will turn. This 1927 article, published anonymously and attributed to Friedrich August von Hayek, tests that distinction by adapting Harvard’s business-cycle indicators to Austria. Missing data demand concrete substitutions: securities-clearing payments stand in for share prices, while twelve wholesale prices form a new index. The resulting patterns offer guidance, but departures from the expected sequence resist mechanical prediction. Combining attention to money, credit, and uneven industrial expansion with statistical measurement, the article shows why seasonal adjustment, trend removal, and correlation still require economic judgment. Its Austrian experiment makes visible both the practical ingenuity involved in constructing a forecasting instrument and the limits imposed by war, structural change, and imperfect evidence.