Freeze the question
The observation month is March 2024 in an entirely invented ledger. The decision cutoff is 20 April 2024 at 16:00 UTC. These dates were constructed for this publication on 16 October 2026; no classification was actually published in April 2024. The exercise asks which values the selection rule permits, not whether a real investor could have traded a recession or an expansion.
Rule threshold-v1 uses zero for both thresholds and an inclusive boundary half-width of 0.1 score points. A score must be outside that band to receive a positive or negative sign. The two inputs are arbitrary growth and inflation-change scores, not reported GDP and CPI. Their units matter because a threshold in these points cannot be transferred to an economic series without defining its transformation.
Reconstruct the eligible pair
The first growth score is 0.15, ingested on 15 April at 13:05 UTC. The first inflation score is -0.30, ingested on 18 April at 13:05 UTC. Both precede the fixed cutoff. Growth is strictly above 0.1 and inflation is below -0.1, so the reconstructed label is G+ / I-. Eligibility concerns ingestion as well as release; the assumed five-minute delay is part of the fictional record.
No other month enters this comparison. There is no moving average, estimation period or hidden fitted coefficient. That simplicity lets a reader separate a data-version change from a method change. The selected revision numbers, timestamp strings and parameter values are retained with the result, rather than keeping only the attractive state name.
Read the later vintage without replacing the first
The second growth score is -0.15 and the second inflation score is -0.25. Both were notionally ingested on 1 March 2025 at 13:05 UTC, well after the April cutoff. Under unchanged parameters they receive G- / I-. The growth sign changes because the assumed revision crosses both the positive boundary and the negative boundary; inflation remains on the negative side.
The latest-vintage calculation is useful for describing revision sensitivity. It is ineligible as an April decision input. A classification table that overwrote the original G+ / I- cell would erase the very distinction being examined. The archive therefore retains two columns and counts the disagreement without selecting either one as a measure of forecasting skill.
Limit the conclusion
This case supplies one deliberate sign-changing example, not an empirical revision rate. Six of the twelve constructed archive labels differ between the two views, but that proportion describes the author's fixture design. There is no independent truth label, return series or loss function with which to measure accuracy. A more attractive economic story in hindsight does not establish a better decision rule.
The linked official documentation explains why information vintages are relevant and how source conventions differ. It does not supply these scores or certify the invented timestamps. For a real study, preserve source-specific release evidence, retrieval details and usage rights, then verify the entire point-in-time chain before presenting results as historically available.
Inspect the comparison
| View | Growth | Inflation | Label |
|---|---|---|---|
| At 2024-04-20T16:00:00Z | 0.15 | -0.30 | G+ / I- |
| Latest fictional revision | -0.15 | -0.25 | G- / I- |
Primary references
References support the stated methods and data conventions. Original fictional examples are not observations from the cited sources.