What do strip joint revenues, lipstick sales, business at secondhand stores, and lunch counter expenses tell us about the direction of the regional economy?

These and other nontraditional indicators have been used to predict where the economy is heading. Some of these indexes appear more fanciful than predictive, but forecasting the future has never been an exact science.

One of the most authoritative traditional economic surveys comes from the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, which regularly publishes an exhaustive analysis of the state of the regional economy.

It surveys a variety of regional businesses and deploys a rigorous methodology to produce what’s called the Beige Book, a report on economic conditions that comes out eight times a year.

The Beige Book, however, is ... beige.

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