The world economy is big. Not "large car park" big: big in the way that makes central bankers hold very long meetings and then say data-dependent with the quiet relief of people who have found a phrase that means nothing and cannot be quoted against them later.
Most macro dashboards respond to this by showing you levels. Inflation is 3.2%. The policy rate is 2.25%. Unemployment is 4.1%. These numbers are true, in the same way that a photograph of a falling piano is true: accurate, detailed, and missing the only thing you actually care about, which is where the piano is going and how fast.
So we built Macro Velocity.
TL;DR for people with somewhere to be:
- 24 indicators, 13 economies plus the world, 226 tiles, horizons from one month to five years.
- Every tile shows speed (how much it moved) and acceleration (whether that move is speeding up or running out of steam).
- Orange is heating, green is cooling, near-black is ordinary, all judged against each series' own history.
- A monthly review on the last Saturday of every month, printed in the Sunday Tribune; a weekly change list every Saturday.
- It explains itself. Hover, tap or press Learn.
What it does
Macro Velocity takes 24 indicators across 13 economies and the world and asks two questions of each one, over five horizons:
- Speed: how much did it move? Rates move in percentage points, levels in percent, survey indices in points.
- Acceleration: is that move speeding up or fading? This is the change of the change, the second derivative, the part that turns before everything else does and is therefore ignored by almost everyone until afterwards.
The indicators cover the whole unhappy family: policy rates, 10-year yields, the yield curve, real policy rates, inflation, house prices, GDP, leading indicators, industrial production, retail sales, business and consumer confidence, unemployment, government debt, broad money, central-bank balance sheets, equity indices, trade-weighted currencies, oil, gold, the dollar and Bitcoin. Bitcoin was included on the grounds that leaving it out would generate more email than including it.
The colours are judging you, but fairly
Every tile is coloured by how unusual its move is compared with that series' own history. A quarter-point move is a scandal for a central bank that has not moved since the fax machine was a lifestyle choice, and a rounding error for oil, which has the emotional stability of a wasp in a jam jar. So each series is measured against its own past, using a robust z-score that politely ignores the occasional apocalypse when working out what "normal" looks like.
Orange means heating, green means cooling, near-black means ordinary. The colour tells you direction, not virtue. Rising unemployment and rising GDP are both orange. The map is a thermometer, not a priest.
Things it noticed this month
At the time of writing, with data mostly through August 2026, the map had opinions:
- Japan's policy rate rose half a point in a year. For Japan this is the monetary equivalent of a tortoise entering a drag race, and it sits at the very edge of the series' history.
- South Korea's equity index roughly doubled in 12 months, and the rise was still speeding up. We are contractually obliged to mention that things which double occasionally remember how to halve.
- The euro area and Australia turned from cutting rates to raising them. The acceleration lens shows a turn like this long before the level looks interesting.
- Gold's rise slowed sharply: up about 8% over the year, after roughly 46% the year before. Still rising, visibly less thrilled about it.
None of this is a forecast. The past is simply the only place with reliable data.
Three ways to look, and one way to understand
Family view groups indicators that tell one story (Rates, Prices, Growth, Activity, Sentiment, Labour, Fiscal, Liquidity and Markets), with one strip per indicator and countries sorted from hottest to coolest. Indicator view gives every measure its own heatmap, two to a row on a desktop and one on a phone. Region view puts a whole part of the world on one board, which is the quickest way to discover that a continent can be heating and cooling at the same time, much like a hotel shower.
Because Macropoiesis is a learning platform, the map explains itself. Hover over any tile, label or button and it tells you what you are looking at and how to read it. Press Learn and a panel explains the heatmap on screen. Tap a tile and you get its history, all five horizons and a plain-English reading such as "the rise is slowing down", which is more than most annual reports manage.
The Month in Motion
On the last Saturday of every month, an AI writes a short review of what moved, what turned and what is quietly accelerating. It works only from the facts on the map, which it is not allowed to embellish, however much it would like to. The review appears on the page and at the bottom of the Sunday Tribune the next morning, the traditional time for reading about things you can do nothing about until Monday.
Every Saturday there is also a weekly change list: which indicators received new data, which changed colour and which turned. No AI, no adjectives, just the facts, in order of how much they moved.
Why we built it
Because markets react to change more than to levels, and to the change of the change most of all. Inflation at 3% means one thing when it is falling from 6% and something quite different when it is rising from 1%. Most people find this out by reading about it afterwards. Macro Velocity is an attempt to find out slightly sooner, or at least to be surprised in better-organised colours.
It refreshes once a day from the BIS, the OECD, the IMF, FRED and market prices. It needs about half a minute and two dozen requests to do it, and it does not require you to know what an SDMX series key is. We found out so you do not have to. It was not fun.
Informational only, not investment advice. The universe makes no promises, and neither do we.