The Lagging Truth

Status: registered, frozen — the first live boards are running. Every prediction here is locked in advance: the claim, the data sources, and the grading rules. Two predictions now carry live tracking boards, recomputed from their named public sources with every update — the next recession and flu-season onset. Boards for the remaining predictions are in development; their registrations are complete and binding now, only the display is coming. Subscribe below and each new board’s launch reaches you first.

Three institutions, three lags — Basel, Social Security, pensions

Registered inside “The Adaptation Tax,” the paper that quantifies what measurement lag costs inside real institutions.

The adaptation-tax paper registers one prediction per institution it studies — each a case of a trailing average steering a consequential system.

Banking regulation. The Basel credit-gap indicator — the international early-warning gauge for credit booms — will understate the boom at the next expansion-driven recession. Its long trailing window cannot see recent acceleration; the gauge reads calm precisely when credit is racing.

Social Security. At the next inflation surge — consumer prices rising more than 4% year-over-year for three consecutive months — the cost-of-living adjustment will lag actual inflation, costing beneficiaries real purchasing power in the gap between prices rising and the adjustment catching up.

Pensions. At the next major market decline — a 20% or deeper fall in the S&P 500 — pension funds’ smoothed accounting will overstate their true asset position. The smoothing that makes the numbers calm also makes them wrong exactly when it matters.

Each prediction names its trigger in advance; each resolves on public data when its trigger arrives.

This page reports registered research predictions. It is education, not advice: nothing here is a forecast service or an investment signal.