Understanding the business cycle is crucial for building economic stability, guiding business planning, and informing investment decisions. The business cycle refers to the recurring pattern of expansion and contraction in economic activity over time. Economic analysis is inherently complex, incorporating a myriad of factors (such as macroeconomic indicators, political decisions). This complexity makes it challenging to fully account for all variables when determining the current state of the economy and predicting its future trajectory in the upcoming months. The objective of this study is to investigate the capacity of machine learning models in automatically analyzing the state of the economic, with the goal of forecasting business phases (expansion, slowdown, recession and recovery) in the United States and the EuroZone. We compared three different machine learning approaches to classify the phases of the business cycle, and among them, the Multinomial Logistic Regression (MLR) achieved the best results. Specifically, MLR got the best results by achieving the accuracy of 65.25% (Top1) and 84.74% (Top2) for the EuroZone and 75% (Top1) and 92.14% (Top2) for the United States. These results demonstrate the potential of machine learning techniques to predict business cycles accurately, which can aid in making informed decisions in the fields of economics and finance.

Calling the top of the current wave of inflation has been a painful exercise for economists and central bankers, who have been proven wrong time and again during the past year. But data on Wednesday, which showed that some measures of inflation had cooled in the world's two largest economies, was likely to rekindle a debate about whether the worst might be over after a year of torrid price growth. United States consumer prices did not rise in July compared with June due to a sharp drop in the cost of petrol, delivering much-needed relief to American consumers on edge after steady prices climbs during the past two years. And China's factory-gate inflation slowed to a 17-month low on an annual basis while consumer prices rose less than expected. After wrongly predicting last year that high inflation would be transitory, most central bankers, including the US Federal Reserve, have stopped trying to put an exact date on when they expect current price growth to peak.