Interpreting macroeconomic conditions involves analyzing several indicators of the macroeconomic conditions in an economy, such as interest rates, income, and other indicators such as CPI, inventory levels, wage rates, consumer confidence, etc. This report will analyze a few of these indicators explaining the expected short impact on firms in the healthcare and automobile industries in terms of operating costs and product sales. There are a large number of variables or characteristics used to gauge the health of an economy, with four of them usually referred to as the key macroeconomic variables: aggregate output or income, the unemployment rate, the inflation rate, and the interest rate. There are, however, numerous additional measures or variables that are collected and used to understand the behavior of an economy. In the United States, for example, additional measures include: the index of leading economic indicators (which gives an idea where the economy is headed in the near future); retail sales (which indicate the strength of consumer demand in the economy); factory orders, especially for big ticket items (which indicate the future growth in output, since the orders will have to be filled); new automobile (robust increase in new automobiles are usually taken as a sign of good growth in the future); the consumer confidence index (which indicates how likely consumers are to make favorable decisions to buy both durable and nondurable goods, services, and homes). Other variables tracked are more innocuous than the ones included in the preceding list, such as: aluminum production, steel production, paper and paperboard production, industrial production, hourly earnings, weekly earnings, factory shipments, orders for
