Has ECRI blown it with their forecast a few months ago that the US was sliding into a new recession?

The short answer is probably not. In reality, recessions rarely begin with a very obvious falling off of the cliff. More often, initial, unrevised data is mixed, and maybe even slightly upbeat, for several months leading into and inside of new ( Read more... )

I have chosen to embed this chart of estimated monthly US GDP in reference to the last post, in which I ask in a poll: "Most recession indicators have yet to return to their pre-2008 "peaks." If a new recession starts now, what is this 2007- TBD funk?".

What I meant by that question is simply most of the key economic indicators of expansion/ ( Read more... )

Look closely at the graph below and you will notice that the NBER's conclusion that the national recession ended in June of last year just simply does not line up in any fashion with the way state coincident indexes looked at the end of previous recessions.

At the end of previous recessions, at the very least, 18 or so states were growing. And that ( Read more... )

From Recession Over, but Pain Persists


( Read more... )

by Gaius Publius on 9/16/2010 01:46:00 PM



If you are interested in a longer examination of the current crisis from Paul Krugman than quick blog posts or OpEd articles, this article, in the New York Review of Books, is for you.

It's called "The Slump Goes On: Why?" by Paul Krugman and Robin Wells, and is being published in two ( Read more... )

Forgotten men
The jobless recovery, long prophesied, is here

Aug 12th 2010 | From The Economist online

FEARS that the recovery of America's economy after the financial crisis would fail to spur an increase in employment are being realised. In July, 52,000 fewer people were employed on non-farm payrolls than in July 2009, the month in which it ( Read more... )

We will probably know by the end of this year if the Great Recession ended sometime in the middle of last year, or if it will go down in the books as actually running from Dec. 2007 through at least the end of 2010 (and making it officially by far the longest recession since the early 1930s).

With the benchmark revisions to GDP just released, it is ( Read more... )

Meant to get this posted several days ago. Better late than never.

For the most part, the voting members of the Egg Heads Society have concluded that the recession which began in 2007 likely ended sometime in the second or third quarter of 2009, but they are not yet positive, and so will wait a little longer for more data to come in before making ( Read more... )

Poll

This Friday non-farm payroll data for the month of May gets released. At the same time, so does the headline unemployment rate (U3) for May. April was reported at 8.9%.

Historically, recoveries in this country have been accompanied by immediate or almost immediate gains in nonfarm payrolls, followed in short order by an associated steady decline in ( Read more... )