{"id":347814,"date":"2025-09-05T18:47:10","date_gmt":"2025-09-05T23:47:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/2025\/09\/05\/the-data-are-pretty-clear-that-we-are-not-in-a-recession\/"},"modified":"2025-09-05T18:47:10","modified_gmt":"2025-09-05T23:47:10","slug":"the-data-are-pretty-clear-that-we-are-not-in-a-recession","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/2025\/09\/05\/the-data-are-pretty-clear-that-we-are-not-in-a-recession\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cThe data are pretty clear that we are not in a recession.\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

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If you think that\u2019s Kevin Hassett opining, you\u2019d be wrong. It\u2019s actually 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, NEC Chair Kevin Hassett stated \u201cI don\u2019t see any sign of recession\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

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

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

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Figure 1:<\/strong> 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, S&P Global Market Insights<\/a> (nee Macroeconomic Advisers, IHS Markit) (9\/2\/<\/em>2025 release), and author\u2019s calculations.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

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Figure 2:<\/strong> 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: Philadelphia Fed [1]<\/a>,\u00a0Philadelphia Fed [2]<\/a>, Federal Reserve, BTS via FRED, BEA 2025Q2 second release,<\/em>\u00a0and author\u2019s calculations.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

See also Larry Kudlow<\/a> today.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

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Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[ad_1] If you think that\u2019s Kevin Hassett opining, you\u2019d be wrong. It\u2019s actually CEA Chair Ed Lazear on May 8, 2008. NBER retrospectively determined that<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":347815,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[155],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/347814"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=347814"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/347814\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/347815"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=347814"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=347814"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=347814"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}