{"id":5592,"date":"2025-09-06T08:16:10","date_gmt":"2025-09-06T08:16:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/5592\/"},"modified":"2025-09-06T08:16:10","modified_gmt":"2025-09-06T08:16:10","slug":"the-data-are-pretty-clear-that-we-are-not-in-a-recession","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/5592\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cThe data are pretty clear that we are not in a recession.\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>If you think that\u2019s Kevin Hassett opining, you\u2019d be wrong. It\u2019s actually<a href=\"https:\/\/econbrowser.com\/archives\/2008\/05\/lazear_sees_no\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\"> CEA Chair Ed Lazear on May 8, 2008<\/a>. NBER retrospectively determined that the business cycle peak was December 2007, so that a recession was underway for four months by that time. Today, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nbcnews.com\/meet-the-press\/video\/-i-don-t-see-any-sign-of-recession-says-nec-director-hassett-despite-weak-jobs-report-246853189922\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">NEC Chair Kevin Hassett stated \u201cI don\u2019t see any sign of recession\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n<p>I remember speaking with a NBER Business Cycle Dating Committee (BCDC) member at the time of Lazear\u2019s statement, and I recall that member \u2014 in a big understatement \u2014 saying \u201cI don\u2019t think that was a good idea\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>See the graph of key indicators followed by the NBER BCDC (employment is one of the top two, the other is personal income ex-current transfers) below.\u00a0 I also show in Figure 2 some alternative indicators.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/recindic_aug25a.png\"><img fetchpriority=\"high\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-57888\" src=\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/recindic_aug25a.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"835\" height=\"532\"  \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Figure 1: Nonfarm Payroll incl benchmark revision employment from CES (bold blue), civilian employment with smoothed population controls (orange), industrial production (red), personal income excluding current transfers in Ch.2017$ (bold light green), manufacturing and trade sales in Ch.2017$ (black), consumption in Ch.2017$ (light blue), and monthly GDP in Ch.2017$ (pink), GDP (blue bars), all log normalized to 2021M11=0. Source: BLS via FRED, Federal Reserve, BEA 2025Q2 second release, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.spglobal.com\/marketintelligence\/en\/mi\/research-analysis\/us-monthly-gdp-index-for-october-2022.html\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">S&amp;P Global Market Insights<\/a> (nee Macroeconomic Advisers, IHS Markit) (9\/2\/2025 release), and author\u2019s calculations.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/recindic_aug25alta.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-57896\" src=\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/recindic_aug25alta.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"835\" height=\"532\"  \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Figure 2: Nonfarm Payroll early benchmark (NFP) (bold blue), civilian employment adjusted to NFP concept, with smoothed population controls (bold orange), manufacturing production (red), personal income excluding current transfers in Ch.2017$ (bold green), real retail sales (black), vehicle miles traveled (green), freight transportation services index (brown), and coincident index in Ch.2017$ (pink), GDO (teal bars), all log normalized to 2021M11=0. Source: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.philadelphiafed.org\/surveys-and-data\/regional-economic-analysis\/early-benchmark-revisions\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Philadelphia Fed [1]<\/a>,\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.philadelphiafed.org\/surveys-and-data\/regional-economic-analysis\/state-coincident-indexes\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Philadelphia Fed [2]<\/a>, Federal Reserve, BTS via FRED, BEA 2025Q2 second release,\u00a0and author\u2019s calculations.<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>See also <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=14RkN7CSYis\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Larry Kudlow<\/a> today.<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If you think that\u2019s Kevin Hassett opining, you\u2019d be wrong. It\u2019s actually CEA Chair Ed Lazear on May&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5593,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[138,219,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-5592","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-business","tag-economy","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5592","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5592"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5592\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5593"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5592"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5592"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5592"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}