Category Archives: recession

No, the US is Not in Recession

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A shorter version of this commentary appeared in Barron’s magazine, June 8, 2022. For a video interview, see BNN/Bloomberg, June 8.

June 9, 2022 — US consumer sentiment, by one measure, is at its lowest level since 2011. More Americans say they hear mostly negative news about the economy than hear positive news, or a balance of positive and negative.  Most remarkably, 57% tell pollsters they believe we are currently in recession versus only 21% who do not.

So, is the US economy already in a recession?  No.  People are unhappy with inflation, which has recently been running 8.3 % [CPI change, from April 2021 to April 2022].  That is the highest since 1982.  But inflation is not recession. Recession is defined as a significant decline in economic activity.  Economic activity is not falling. Quite the contrary: it has been booming.  It is worth spelling out the evidence. read more

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The Global Outlook

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          This set of questions and answers appears in Capital Magazine in July 2021, translated into Turkish. read more

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Defining recessions when negative growth is too common or too rare

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June 20, 2020 — This post follows up on “What Determines When a Recession is Recession?” which pointed out some drawbacks of defining a recession by two negative quarters of growth.

In some countries there is another, more fundamental, basis for questioning the two-quarter rule for determining recession, or any GDP-based rule. Some countries experience sharp slowdowns or periods of diminished economic activity and yet their long-term trend growth rates are either so high or so low that the negative-growth rule does not capture what is needed to describe the cyclical state of the economy. For such countries, the problem is that perhaps there is nothing special about the number zero.  This is particularly true for the global economy considered as a whole. read more

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