So U-Haul has so few trucks in San Diego, that they give you a 50% discount for driving a truck there. They badly need the trucks in San Diego, for all the people in the exodus out of San Diego. I bet you would find similar stats for leaving anywhere in CA, FL, NY, etc. Has anyone looked over the UHaul site more, to see which cities/states have the highest exodues?
We could use the UHaul data as a leading indicator, where the Census Bureau lags by about 5 years.
BTW, I’m getting really excited about leading indicators. The book, Ahead of the Curve, is about that topic. Written by a Goldman Sachs economist, with 18 years in the retail sector, he writes about the cause-effect relationships of various data, and where economists make the mistakes. For example, they think that employment is a leading indicator of job growth, where in reality it is a 9-12 month lagging indicator. The leading indicator is consumer spending. I’m sure we can improve his model by adding MEW and the U-Haul data.
