Macro News in Market Moves: Classifying News through Asset Co-movements

This paper introduces CLONE (Classification Of News), a method that decomposes asset price movements into four types of macroeconomic news—aggregate demand, productivity, inflation, and monetary policy—based on joint changes in prices of stocks, bonds, and inflation swaps. CLONE’s simplicity and forward-looking focus enable the identification of real-time economic signals that are critical for understanding market behavior and guiding policy decisions. We show that from 2004 to 2024 aggregate demand news historically dominated daily variation in asset prices, while inflation and monetary policy news have gained importance since 2021. We validate our method against sign-restricted VAR models and apply it to major U.S. macroeconomic data releases, providing insights into how market participants interpret and react to forward-looking information. We discuss several benefits of our approach relative to the standard sign restriction method.