Managed by Philippa Dunne and Doug Henwood, TLR on the Economy is an independent research outfit located in New York.

Our proprietary surveys of state-level withholding and sales tax receipts are the backbone of our work. We have long-standing relationships with senior revenue estimators in tax departments around the country, whose insights give us a unique take on the state of the US economy. Instead of looking at total personal income receipts, which include non-wage income, we track withheld taxes since they are levied on wages and bonuses, not capital gains and the like.

We do our own macro-economic research, and, unlike many other research-providers, do not manage money: we are beholden to no one but our subscribers and ourselves.

Philippa Dunne and Douglas Henwood were John Liscio’s closest associates and, since John’s untimely death in 2000, are honored to be carrying on the research techniques he pioneered when he established The Liscio Report on the international scene in 1992.

We are known for our meticulous dissection of federal data, for pointing out technical anomalies glossed over in the mainstream press (and related debunking of market rumors), and for ferreting out market-moving shifts in the economic landscape as they develop, getting the news out to our readers before the mainstream media catches on. We also grill the highly informed senior tax officials who participate in our surveys on their favored indicators, like diesel-fuel consumption, and collect their thoughts on emerging economic trends for our subscribers. They are watching the cash flow into the state coffers so they know what they are talking about.

Look for us in Barron’s, the FT, Reuters, and the Wall Street Journal; on Bloomberg, Reuters, and CNBC; and around the web.

Philippa Dunne
Philippa Dunne was hired by John Liscio in 1996 to work on special projects, and in 1997 began full-time work as the “research department,” specifically to develop her own set of states for our monthly surveys of state tax collections and to handle the burgeoning demands of TLR on the Economy.

She graduated from University of California and has a Master’s Degree from Wesleyan University. A musician by training, in previous lives she has performed widely and taught at a number of colleges and private institutions, done research and writing for the Office of Ray and Charles Eames in California and for the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and, true to her name, worked in stables exercising steeplechasers. She lives in New York with her husband.

Douglas Henwood
While working toward his PhD in English at the University of Virginia, Doug returned to his earlier interest, the dismal science, and by the mid-1980s was regularly writing about the world economy with special attention to finance and the labor markets.

He caught the attention of John Liscio and as the “resident wise man” he crunched stats and analyzed them for John from the report’s very first days. A widely recognized economic analyst, Doug has given talks at venues all over the U.S. and abroad as well. He’s also frequently quoted or cited in the media, including newspapers ranging from The Asia Times to the New York Times to the Times of London.

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We’re the ones who track monthly withholding and sales tax receipts in the 25 largest states, and are known for our spot-on interpretation of what changes in revenue flows mean for our overall economy, and by traders around the world for the accurate forecasts of the BLS’s Employment Report, and the Census’s Advance Retail Sales print, both built on the results of our surveys. During  months when calendar effects influence revenue flows, like bonus season, we fine-tune our analysis to take such effects into account. But, as you can see below, even before we do that, state Withheld tax Diffusion Index has a .82 correlation with non-farm payrolls (both in year-over-year quarterly averages to smooth out noise). When our surveys start to change course, we are able to warn our readers that a change is coming before it surfaces in the official data:

Our Sales Tax Diffusion Index (SDI) a .80 correlation with the Advance Retail Sales print:

The markets work on shocks to expectations: when our tax contacts are shocked, that’s something you need to know. And please note that both our WDI and our SDI picked up the current weakening trend early in the year.

Please read through our Sample Reports directly below to see our work, as it was published, for yourself. We’ve been warning our readers for decades about crucial trends before they were visible: the 2001 profit squeeze, hidden weakness in the labor market that led to several big downward benchmark revisions, research in 2006 showing that the then-current housing boom was an anomaly in US history, so preparing our readers for what was to come. We also flagged a sudden reversal in remittances to Mexico that signaled the housing collapse, and both recent collapses in oil prices. We pushed back on the idea that we were heading back into recession in 2012/13 because state-level withheld and sales receipts, while not great, were holding up. And, although it has been pretty monotonous, we began warning in 2009 that we were in for a decade-long slog through a swamp with chronic slow growth and inflation too low for the FOMC. For the last few years the FOMC, unfortunately, has been the only game in town, and we’ve providing steady, insightful analysis of what we knew they would do: work to overcome the stagnation that follows a financial crisis until there are real signs that wages are picking up, as they may, finally, be doing these days.