Reading the Halvering Economy in Five Numbers

Economies are easiest to read where they are smallest. Halvering, the port city at the mouth of the Teal Basin, publishes no single figure that says how it is doing. It publishes five untidy ones. This desk checks them every Monday, and this is why.

All amounts are in Halver marks (HM). All data below are invented for the purposes of this demonstration.

1. Boxes lifted

The Harbour Authority counts every container lifted off or on at the quay. Last week the figure was 6,140, against 5,880 the week before and 6,310 in the same week a year ago. A single week means little. Four weeks in the same direction means something. We've now had three of them up.

What the number cannot tell you is what is in the boxes. For that you need the second count.

2. Cold-store occupancy

The three refrigerated warehouses on the east quay report how full they are, as a share of pallet positions. This week: 87 percent. In summer the figure usually sits near 70. High occupancy is the sign of goods waiting, either for ships that are late or for buyers who are slow, and the second reading is the more worrying.

The Authority's note attributes it to "scheduling". We asked two operators. One said scheduling. The other declined to comment.

3. Flour orders

Halvering has one flour mill and it supplies most of the city's bakeries. Its weekly order book, which the mill shares with the trade association, rose 4 percent. Bakeries are a good early indicator because they order against what they expect to sell in a fortnight, and they have no reason to flatter anyone.

4. Empty doors on Lantern Row

Lantern Row has 96 ground-floor units. The council's vacancy sheet lists 11 as empty, which is two more than at the start of the quarter. That is a count of doors, not of money, but it is hard to massage. A shuttered shop is a shuttered shop.

A vacancy figure is the one number in a town that landlords and tenants both resent equally.

5. Ferry passengers

The harbour ferry carried 41,200 people last week, up 3 percent. It is the best measure we have of ordinary movement: shoppers, commuters, people going to hospital. It also moves with the weather, so we read it with the forecast open next to it.

What do we do with the five? We do not average them. Averages hide the disagreements, and the disagreements are the story. This week boxes are rising, cold stores are filling, flour is steady, vacancies are creeping up and the ferry is busier. A reader could build an optimistic paragraph or a worried one from those five facts, and both would be honest.

We'll print the next set on Monday. The shape matters more than any single week, and the shape takes a quarter to draw.

Names, places and events in this demo are fictional.