The Fed developing an early crisis detector?

Look at this indicator from Apr 2008:

Riots from Haiti to Bangladesh to Egypt over the soaring costs of basic foods have brought the issue to a boiling point and catapulted it to the forefront of the world's attention, the head of an agency focused on global development said Monday.

"This is the world's big story," said Jeffrey Sachs, director of Columbia University's Earth Institute.

"The finance ministers were in shock, almost in panic this weekend," he said on CNN's "American Morning," in a reference to top economic officials who gathered in Washington. "There are riots all over the world in the poor countries ... and, of course, our own poor are feeling it in the United States."

This indicator is almost as good as the Baltic Dry Index!

The BDI picked up the Apr 2008 crisis, didn't it?

But the best detector would be the ratio of the CPU to PPI price index.