The US economy has had a rough first half in 2015, but the pace of growth is picking up. The Atlanta Fed's GDPNow model projects a second-quarter expansion of 2.4% (seasonally adjusted annual rate), based on the July 17 estimate. That's a modest rise, but it represents an encouraging rebound from Q1's mild contraction. It's debatable if we'll see the rate of growth continue to improve in the second half of the year. Meantime, a broad review of economic and financial indicators continues to reflect a positive trend for the macro profile through June. In other words, the current data strongly suggest that last month wasn't the start of a new recession.

Using a methodology outlined in Nowcasting The Business Cycle: A Practical Guide For Spotting Business Cycle Peaks, an aggregate of economic and financial trend behavior shows that business-cycle risk remained low through last month. Indeed, the Economic Trend and Momentum indices (ETI and EMI, respectively) are still at levels that equate with expansion. The current profile of published indicators through last month  (12 of 14 data sets) for ETI and EMI reflect positive trends, with the exception of the corporate bond spread and a slightly negative dip in the year-over-year comparison for the real monetary base.

Here's a summary of recent activity for the components in ETI and EMI:

Aggregating the data into business cycle indexes reflects positive trends overall. The latest numbers for ETI and EMI indicate that both benchmarks are well above their respective danger zones: 50% for ETI and 0% for EMI. When the indexes fall below those tipping points, we'll have clear warning signs that recession risk is elevated. Based on the latest updates for June — ETI is 90.5% and EMI is 6.4% — there's still a comfortable margin of safety between current values and the danger zones, as shown in the chart. (See note below for ETI/EMI design rules.)