Yesterday’s employment release indicated a deceleration in nonfarm payroll (NFP) employment growth. Data from other sources suggests that the deceleration over the last year is more marked than indicated by the establishment survey.
State level GDP data for 2019Q3 are out today. If you were wondering, Wisconsin lagged both the US and Minnesota. Since 18Q4 (the last full Walker quarter), Wisconsin growth has matched Minnesota growth.
Why was the financial crisis of 2008 so surprising to so many macroeconomists (but from my experience, a little less so for international finance economists familiar with financial crises in emerging markets…)? From the conclusion to George Akerlof’s “What They Were Thinking Then: The Consequences for Macroeconomics during the Past 60 Years” in the latest JEP.
From ASSA, take a look at the first paper’s abstract:
Today, we present a guest post written by Jeffrey Frankel, Harpel Professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and formerly a member of the White House Council of Economic Advisers.
It’s the year that Donald Trump said that in the war against Great Britain, “Our army manned the air, it rammed the ramparts, it took over the airports, it did everything it had to do, and at Fort McHenry, under the rockets’ red glare, it had nothing but victory.”
Here are some key indicators tracked by NBER’s Business Cycle Dating Committee:
Figure 1: Nonfarm payroll employment (blue), industrial production (red), personal income excluding transfers in Ch.2012$ (green), manufacturing and trade sales in Ch.2012$ (black), and monthly GDP in Ch.2012$ (pink), all log normalized to 2019M01=0. Source: BLS, Federal Reserve, BEA, via FRED, Macroeconomic Advisers (12/30 release), and author’s calculations.
Net impact on employment from Trump’s trade war and associated retaliation:
Source: Flaaen and Pierce, 2019.
Raw steel production is down, as is primary metal employment.
November employment figures are out. Time to re-evaluate this assessment from two years ago in Political Calculations that California was in recession.
Going by these [household survey based labor market] measures, it would appear that recession has arrived in California, which is partially borne out by state level GDP data from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. [text as accessed on 12/27/2017]