Following up on the drop in heavy truck sales in August, here’s the prediction from a simple probit of recession (NBER peak-to-trough) on current 12 month  heavy truck sales growth:

Figure 1: Estimated probability of NBER recession using probit on heavy truck sales growth (blue). Red line at current value of 0.28. NBER defined peak-to-trough recession dates shaded gray. Source: NBER, and author’s calculations.

Notice, using this model and a 28% threshold yields only on false positive: 2016.