From the Badger Institute:
Will things improve? No: 47% expect the national economy to “remain flat” over the next six months, and 20% — one in five —expect it to “decline,” as in recession.
“Optimism is falling,” said WMC President Kurt Bauer, who quoted one captain of industry as saying, “We may not be in a recession, but we are certainly in something.”
Here’re some data, suggesting we’re not in a recession as of December:
Figure 1: Wisconsin Nonfarm Payroll Employment (dark blue), Philadelphia Fed early benchmark measure of NFP (pink), Civilian Employment (tan), real wages and salaries, deflated by national chained CPI (sky blue), GDP (red), coincident index (green), all in logs 2021M11=0. Source: BLS, BEA, Philadelphia Fed [1], [2], and author’s calculations.
What about through January? Here’re the weekly indices from Baumeister/Leiva-Leon/Sims, for data releases through 1/27 (for the states, through 2/10 for the US):
Figure 2: Buameister/Levia-Leon/Sims WECI for US (black), WI (blue) ,TX (red), relative to trend y/y, in %. Source: Baumeister/Leiva-Leon/Sims.
Wisconsin growth is above trend, above Texas and US growth. So if the recession is coming to Wisconsin, it’s (likely) not here yet.
Previous appearance of Badger Institute analysis in Econbrowser, here.
