Variables of interest for analyzing business cycles include employment, unemployment, household incomes, retail sales, spending on durable goods like automobiles, housing investment, industrial production, business orders, shipments, inventories, commercial construction, profits, revenues, consumer inflation, producer price inflation, wage inflation, productivity, unit labor costs, and GDP inflation, to name some of the main categories. In addition, financial variables, like interest rates, credit, and money supply are cyclical. We will discuss the business-cycle behavior of financial
