He was feverishly scribbling what she thought was "terrorist code" or foreign lettering into a notebook. It turned out that Guido Menzio, an Italian economist from the the University of ...

Hence the use of covers as a contrarian indicator. Interestingly, their analysis finds that after 180 days only about 53.3% of Economist covers are contrarian; little better than tossing a coin.

The odds are high that the United States economy will sink into a recession sometime within in the next year, according to a former chief economist for the International Monetary Fund.