The unemployment rate rose to 4.3 percent in July, and nonfarm payroll employment edged up by 114,000.

So, unemployment is now 0.8 percent higher than a year ago, which is a strong predictor of an imminent recession, but payrolls are still climbing, though by less than normal. Either payrolls will bounce back during August, or ( Read more... )

Over the past 50 years, there has been a close correlation (0.97) between total energy production and inflation-adjusted GDP in the US. We have seen a slow increase in energy efficiency averaging about 1% per year, but otherwise an increase in GDP generally requires a proportional increase in energy production ( Read more... )

If you average the monthly consumer price index during all of 2023, and compare this to the average during all of 2022, consumer inflation was 4.1% during 2023. That was the third highest annual price increase of the past 30 years, the most inflation except for 2022 (8.0%) and 2021 (4.7%). The price increases of the past three years were the ( Read more... )

According to Brad DeLong, the reason why we're all economists now (my phrasing, not his) is because of the phenomenal growth in our productivity over the past 150 years. Before 1870, human productivity didn't change much over the course of a lifetime, so it wasn't a factor in how we structured our societies or our personal lives. A person's role ( Read more... )

We don't have good GDP figures for the 1920s, but we do have good industrial production figures starting with 1919. We also have good figures for the money supply in the 1920s ( Read more... )

No, no, no, no, no, no!This is one of the biggest economic myths in the US, that our manufacturing industry has moved offshore!  This never happened ( Read more... )

Another Bearish indicator for our Recession Watch --

At 3.5%, a tie for the lowest unemployment rate since 1969, the national unemployment rate is too low in the US. For as long as we've been consistently measuring monthly unemployment statistics (since 1948), every time the unemployment rate has dropped to 3.5% or lower, a recession has begun ( Read more... )

Another recession-watch data point ( Read more... )

As I wrote about before, earlier this month the US yield curve inverted, which means overnight interest rates are higher than long-term interest rates, for the first time since the pandemic recession.  The strongest indicator of an upcoming recession that we have is an inverted yield curve.  There is one stronger indicator that a recession has ( Read more... )

As I drove T to the airport I told him about the new interest-rate inversion caused by the Fed, and my resuting official Recession Watch ( Read more... )