EJ Antoni and Peter St. Onge argue we have been deceived by incorrect deflators. Rebuttal, showing the irreproducibility of their results, and non-deflator sensitive indicators, downloadable here, with new data.
Figure 9 from Chinn (2024): Nonfarm payroll (NFP) employment (blue), preliminary benchmark NFP (tan), early benchmark (red), aggregate hours in private sector (light blue), private NFP employment from ADP (light green), civilian employment (dark red), civilian employment using population controls implied by CBO estimates of immigration (lilac), industrial production (chartreuse), coincident index (purple), in logs 2021M11=0. Source: BLS, Federal Reserve Board via FRED, Philadelphia Fed, and author’s calculations.
In this new version of the paper, I document that these non-deflator sensitive indicators are all above end-2021 levels, indicating that we have not been in a recession — defined as NBER’s BCDC would — since 2022.
Even industrial production — which has declined less than 0.9% since September 2022 peak — is up relative to end-2019. Note that industrial production value added accounts for about 17% of GDP, and 8.1% of nonfarm payroll employment as of September 2024. Hence, while this indicator is not quickly rising, it is not a particularly broad indicator of economic activity.
This is, of course, what any honest economist would do before making claims like those made by the Heritage boys. It’s what NBER does, so even if one lacks imagination, one need only have passing familiarity with the conventions of economics to know that there are easy checks for a claim about the level of real output.
Even the easy dodge of “I’m heterodox” isn’t available to the Heritage boys. They were simply dishonest about a perfectly orthodox measure of economic activity.
Biden calls out Musk over a published report that the Tesla CEO once worked in the US illegally
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/biden-calls-out-musk-over-a-published-report-that-the-tesla-ceo-once-worked-in-the-us-illegally/ar-AA1t1f0s?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=U531&cvid=183992cf2e7547f78f9fe7c666d8b74c&ei=12
“That wealthiest man in the world turned out to be an illegal worker here. No, I’m serious. He was supposed to be in school when he came on a student visa. He wasn’t in school. He was violating the law. And he’s talking about all these illegals coming our way?” Biden said while campaigning on Saturday in Pittsburgh at a union hall. The Washington Post reported that Musk worked illegally in the country while on a student visa. The newspaper, citing company documents, former business associates and court documents, said Musk arrived in Palo Alto, California in 1995 for a graduate program at Stanford University “but never enrolled in courses, working instead on his startup. ”
Ah but Elon is a white guy so this was OK. Only brown and black people are not welcomed to work in Trump’s America!
Elon Musk habla en la iglesia Life Center el sábado 19 de octubre de 2024, en Harrisburg, Pensilvania. (Sean Simmers/The Patriot-News vía AP)
Elon Musk habla en la iglesia Life Center el sábado 19 de octubre de 2024, en Harrisburg, Pensilvania. (Sean Simmers/The Patriot-News vía AP)
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if the failed state of the USA had been in recession for said time it would have shown up in the labour force surely
In a variety of labor market data, in fact. For instance:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IC4WSA
Oh but Antoni has his cute ways of misrepresenting BLS data too!
I notice that since 2022 FRED series gdpc1 has exceeded gdppot_d11(SA) by about 1% rounded to about 2.4% recently.
Using a logit model, with a threshold gap between gdpc1 and gdppot_d11 of 1.0% or more and lagging the gap by two quarters, the odds of a recession starting seems rather small.
Unfortunately, not a very high McFadden R-squared, however.
Just my 2 cents (but 2 cents is not too valuable these days).