Once again, Heritage’s EJ Antoni speaks (on Fox) about a manufacturing recession, focusing on employment. I’ll just point out that, according to the most relevant indicator, the manufacturing sector hasn’t been in a downturn for two years.
True, employment and hours are down. So is the Fed’s manufacturing production index. On the latter, note that this is a gross value index. And as for employment and hours, well, employment and hours have been dropping for a long time, because…productivity!
Figure 1: Manufacturing employment (production and nonsupervisory) (blue), hours (green), production (tan), and value added in Ch.2017$ (red), all in logs, 2022M10=0. Source: BLS and Federal Reserve via FRED, and BEA, and author’s calculations.
So…if you focus on GDP as a measure of aggregate economic activity (as EJ Antoni does), you should be looking at value added as the relevant metric for manufacturing (since GDP is conceptually the sum of value added).
Speaking of productivity, it’s interesting to consider what happened in the wake of the imposition of tariffs on Chinese imports.
Figure 2: Output per hour in manufacturing (black). Source: BLS via FRED.
It’ll be interesting to see what happens to manufacturing productivity once Trump Trade War 2.0 starts.
sounds like he is trying to manufacture a recession
“So…if you focus on GDP as a measure of aggregate economic activity (as EJ Antoni does)…”
Similarly:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/USMANRQGSP
This way, Heritage boy doesn’t need to grasp that head-ache-inducing value-added nuance, and there’s good reason to believe he doesn’t. All he has to do is look at the GDP tables.
Or maybe he’ll discover more GDP “mismeasurement” in the fact that manufacturing output is rising in the GDP tables.
I’m waiting for Antoni’s big pivot. Starting next month — “Greatest economy ever!”
Yoon’s team claims immunity from insurrection charges, citing Trump ruling from US Supreme Court.
For real. Not kidding. The US Supreme Court corruption is a global contagion.
Today, historian and ersatz economist Niall Ferguson says in the UK Times: “I was wrong to call Donald Trump a would-be tyrant.”
He traveled to Mar-a-Lago to bend the knee and then literally jumped up to dance to Trump’s playlist favorite, “YMCA”. I’m not kidding.
The cult would be ridiculous if it weren’t so dangerous.
And for context, Trump has an app on his phone which he uses to control in real time the playlist in the Mar-a-Lago dining room. He punches “YMCA” and on cue everyone is required to jump up and dance to “YMCA.” That’s how you signify your total committed loyalty to the Dear Leader. He punches a button and everyone literally jumps.
It really is a crazy cult.