With the personal income for August, we have the following picture of key indicators followed by the NBER’s Business Cycle Dating Committee (BCDC). Personal income ex-current transfers and employment are more heavily weighted than other indicators.

Figure 1: Implied NFP preliminary benchmark revision (bold blue), civilian employment with smoothed population controls, 3 month centered moving average (bold orange), industrial production (red), Bloomberg consensus employment for implied preliminary benchmark, (blue square), 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 2025M04=0. Source: BLS via FRED, Federal Reserve, BEA 2025Q2 third release, S&P Global Market Insights (nee Macroeconomic Advisers, IHS Markit) (9/2/2025 release), and author’s calculations. 

August NFP is only 0.07% above the April value, while the Bloomberg consensus for September  (for +39K net gain) is 0.09% above. The 3 month centered moving average of civilian employment is 0.2% below April value. Either in raw form or centered moving average, civilian employment is below recent peak. Essentially, employment growth is “dead in the water”. And should one be a believer in the civilian (household) series turning points better presage recessions, one should be worried.

Here are alternative indicators (including the new early benchmark from the Philadelphia Fed), and the most recent coincident index

Figure 2: Nonfarm Payroll early benchmark (NFP) (bold blue), Bloomberg consensus (blue square), civilian employment adjusted to NFP concept, 3 month centered moving average (bold orange), manufacturing production (red), private NFP from ADP/Stanford (light green), real retail sales (black), vehicle miles traveled (teal), BTS Freight Services Index (tan), and coincident index in Ch.2017$ (pink), GDO (blue bars), all log normalized to 2025M04=0. Retail sales deflated by chained CPI, adjusted by author using geometric X-13. Source: Philadelphia Fed [1], Philadelphia Fed [2], Federal Reserve via FRED, BEA 2025Q2 third release, and author’s calculations.

Notice that the Philadelphia Fed’s early benchmark value for July is only 0.05% above April’s value.

For those who argue for the substitution of private series for government (BLS) employment series, it’s of interest that the ADP-Stanford Digital Lab private employment series is only 0.2% above April levels.

While the labor market statistics are not very positive, it is interesting that consumption growth continues (despite real personal income trending sideways). This signifies either the stock of savings remains high, optimism about future disposable income (which seems counter to household survey results), or accelerated spending to avoid future tariffs.

All in all, data through August suggest the economy has not yet hit negative growth along all key dimensions of economic activity. However, higher frequency data going through mid-September suggests a slowdown is coming.

Figure 3: Lewis-Mertens-Stock WEI (blue), and Baumeister-Levia-Leon-Sims WECI plus trend growth of 2% (tan), both in %. Source: Dallas Fed via FRED, Weekly State Indexes.