The best advice I can give you is to realize that there is an unavoidable amount of uncertainty in the economy. This is even more true of firms and their financial statements. The first thing you should know is that there's a lot of uncertainty out there, and no amount of commercial forecasting is going to change that. If you're Al Checchi at Northwest Airlines, it doesn't help to say that your forecasters didn't predict the Gulf War, the 1991 recession, and the related decline in air traffic. But you still want to get the best forecasts possible.
Business economists look at anything and everything to get an idea where the economy is headed.
Among the best variables are those related to financial markets. There are a number of different monetary aggregates, as we'll see later, but we'll focus for now on M2, which includes most of the deposits at commercial banks and other other financial institutions that accept deposits. In this sense it is a good indicator of the state of the economy. And since money stock measures are generally made available more quickly than GDP, it tells us something about the current state of the economy as well. Even better indicators are financial prices and yields, which have the additional advantage of being available immediately.