Today, we present a guest post written by David Papell and Ruxandra Prodan-Boul, Professor of Economics at the University of Houston and Economics Lecturer at Stanford University.
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The Availability of Quarterly GDP Data for the US: Memo to EJ Antoni
Referring to Dr. Antoni’s definition of recessions using quarterly data, here are the GDP data series for the US I am aware of.
Why Friends Don’t Let Friends Define Recessions as Two Consecutive Quarters of Negative GDP Growth
That’s exactly what EJ Antoni did in “Biden’s Recession” (August 1, 2022):
EJ Antoni: “factor in the millions of people missing from the labor market (don’t have jobs but are excluded from official unemployment calculation)”
That’s a plea from an X post a year ago. He presented various calculations (which are hard to replicate, because he does funny things like mixing CES numbers and CPS numbers), but indeed BLS calculates such a series: the U6 unemployment rate, which contrary to his assertion, economists are aware of. I will follow up on citing this series, even if Dr. Antoni has not in the past eight months.
Six Measures of Nonfarm Payroll Employment
Including Philadelphia Fed early benchmark, released today. Several series are below recent peaks, including the early benchmark.
Everyday Prices (Still) Going Up – and Big Mac for Me, but not for Thee
From the American Institute for Economic Research, compared to CPI, and CPI for fast food…
Miran: “I don’t see any material inflation from tariffs…”
From CNN. OK.
Stephen Moore Remains Blithely Detached from Reality: Tax Cut Impacts
From Swagel, “CBO’s Estimates of the 2017 Tax Act: Growth and Revenues” released today:
CBO’s April 2018 projections of revenues in 2018 and 2019 were remarkably
accurate.Actual federal revenues in 2018 and 2019 were 99.8 percent and 99.2 percent of
the amounts that CBO projected. In other words, CBO was very slightly
overoptimistic about revenues in the years after enactment of the 2017 tax act,
and the agency’s revenue projection errors for those years were much smaller
than average.
Civilian Employment Peaked in April 2025
So too has CPS series adjusted to NFP concept, a series pushed in the wake of the slow employment recovery from the 2001 recession. On the other hand, preliminary benchmark NFP, and NFP estimated using QCEW data continue to crawl upward.
EJ Antoni ‘s “Sustainable” Employment Measure Is in the Red
EJ Antoni noted a year ago (Sept 6, 2024):
gov’t and the gov’t-dominated healthcare sector [employment growth].. it’s all tax-payer funded, and it’s not at all sustainable