San Francisco Fed Provides New Method to Monitor US Economic Recession Golden Finance reports that researchers at the San Francisco Federal Reserve have proposed a new recession warning indicator, providing economists with more tools to assess whether the United States may fall into a recession. This tool, called the Labor Market Stress Indicator (LMSI), reveals regional differences in the labor market by counting the number of states where unemployment rates have risen by at least 0.5 percentage points from the lowest level in the past 12 months. The research report points out that "whenever 30 or more states simultaneously experience accelerated unemployment rates, the national economy almost always falls into recession. The LMSI method is transparent - only counting states with accelerated unemployment rates - easy to interpret, and provides valuable insights into the regional distribution of economic pressures