GSS: There was a breakthrough last week in the six-week old Breakingviews.com Green Shoots Spotter. A real green shoot finally appeared. A report that United Airlines was ready to buy $10bn worth of aircraft was the first piece of news since the series began that sounded like a real recovery. The turn in the economy generally comes when companies start to make big orders to take advantage of poor business conditions.
The United order wasn’t enough to move the needle much. The GSS scale, which goes from 1 (still in real trouble) to 5 (rapid recovery) remains stuck at 2 (getting less bad). Still, much of the worst news – the index takes the headlines as they come in – was backward looking. The economic freefall that followed the Lehman collapse is over. The next question is what comes next. The current weight of evidence points to a very slow recovery, but these are unprecedented times.
