www.enreport.com

Ref:
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/24023/?nlid=2294
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/23839/#comment-212835
http://arxiv.org/abs/0907.1827
http://www.er.ethz.ch/fco/

If you are making forecasts, new and timely statistics are extremely important. You will also know that generally, new data come up with a lag. For example in Turkey it takes not less than 2 months for us to see crucial data. This recent article at Google Research will probably help us, all.
The paper by Varian and Choi can be downloaded from here. The mechanism is clever yet simple: use the normalized searched volumes from Google Insight to correlate with the real data like house sales, cars and etc.
Although I use some other data for Turkey, let me show you the effect of recent tax break on auto.

The tax break has been revealed on 16th March 2009 and the search volume is given above (keyword:oto, region: Turkey). The effect is close to %67. According to this article, the actual sale figures raise by 100%.

http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2009/04/predicting-present-with-google-trends.html
http://google.com/googleblogs/pdfs/google_predicting_the_present.pdf
http://www.hurriyet.com.tr/ekonomi/11470037.asp

One of my friends has shared the following article from New York Times which I enjoyed reading. The article tries to find out whether we reached the "bottom of recession", using several indicators. It looks to three indicators:

One of my favourite sites on the net is Graphoilogy. Although they do not post that frequently, the site is quite useful for anyone interested in graphs and their relations to oil. Last month they have posted a graph from Traffic Volume Trends:
Data from : http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/tvtw/tvtpage.cfm
Sources:
http://graphoilogy.blogspot.com/2009/02/vehicle-miles-driven-at-record-low.html
http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2009/02/us-vehicle-miles-driven-off-36-in-2008.html

One of the implications of the recession is the big drops in electricity demands. In the developing countries, we see electricity demand drops followed by drops at industrial activity statistics. Here we see a basic example of economic activity(export rate is an indicator of Chinese economy) and electricity demand.

This news (China hit by massive drop in exports) from Financial Times says :
"Chinese exports plunged 25.7 per cent in February compared with a year ago, much higher than analysts had expected, as the global economic crisis began to take its full toll on the country’s export sector."

You should also check the following line:
"China’s exports have decreased for four months in a row, but until February the rate of decline had been much slower than seen in other Asian countries with large export sectors. .... The trade surplus, which has been at record levels for the last four months, also shrank sharply from $39.1bn to $4.84bn."

This reminded me the news from last month about a drop in Chinese electricity demand. Last month(Jan 2008), we have seen a 13% drop in Chinese electricity demand:

"Major power producers generated only 250.3 million megawatt hours of electricity last month, falling 13 percent from a year earlier, the China Daily reported. This is the fourth consecutive month that electricity generation in the country declined".
Source: China Post

Also read this one from Xinhua:

"However, the decline was smaller than in November and December, when power use fell 8.6 percent and 8.93 percent, respectively. According to CEC, the slowing pace of decline was a sign of economic recovery, as industrial use accounts for about 75 percent of total consumption. "

If you check Chinese state grid web site (http://www.sgcc.com.cn/) , you will see that the graphs (English / Statistics) are not updated for a long time

The happy days are over and we cannot have a good prediction for the end of this recession. Energy demand is highly correlated with economic growth. For developed countries, energy demand growth is less than the economic growth, on the other hand for developing nations it may be more than the economic growth.
So to forecast energy demand, oil prices and new investment cycle, economic forecasts are very important.
Recently econbrowser.com website has a very interesting post to read. It may need some econometric background but the main point is quite clear. Will the rebound from the recession start with a big jump or just average?
Answers vary, and if you read the post and relevant links, there are two explainations:
1. It will be higher than normal : (Trend stationary)
"suppose that the economy is down because people are postponing the purchases of cars and other goods out of fear. That would be a trend-stationary story, because it suggests a nice rebound when people get over their fear."
2 . It will be just around average: (Unit root)
"Suppose that the economy is down because we accumulated the wrong types of physical capital (houses) and human capital (skills in mortgage securitization). That is a unit-root type problem. Yes, the economy will start growing again at some point, but that misallocation of physical and human capital is a permanent loss. We are not going to make up for it with some above-normal growth."

The detailed explanations and models worth reading:

From EconBrowser.com

A simple regression of log GDP on a time trend and lagged log GDP, over the 1967q1-08q4 period yields the following:

y_t = 0.424+0.0004time + 0.945y_t-1

Where Adj-R² = 0.9995, SER = 0.008

The AR1 coefficient of 0.945 (se = 0.03) implies a half life of 12.25 quarters, or slightly over 3 years for a deviation from output. Since AR coefficients are biased downward, this is a downwardly biased estimate of the half life.

Brad de Long's Blog

A more technical article about this issue:
Unit root or trend stationary
from Greg Mankiw's Blog