From WSJ:
“It’s the ‘Godot’ recession,” said Ray Farris, chief economist at Credit Suisse. Mr. Farris found himself among a small minority of economists last fall who predicted the economy would narrowly skirt a downturn this year. Every six months, economists have predicted a recession six months later, he said. “By the middle of the year, people will still be expecting a recession in six months’ time.”
House Representative Gooden’s recent comments discussed in LA Times:
I found this paragraph from a Re:Russia article of interest:
Year-on-year 2022 is -2.1%.
We have a 2nd release for GDP, and nowcasts for Q1. We also have GDP+ and a guess for GDO for Q4. This is the picture, taking CBO’s estimate of potential GDP.
That’s what Ed Leamer noted back in 2007. Residential construction employment, spending, housing starts, new home sales, all normalized to 2021M11.
S&P Global (formerly Macroeconomic Advisers) released monthly GDP for January today, indicating a rebound in activity – 0.3% m/m growth. Adding this to a graph of key indicators followed by the NBER BCDC yields the following:
Consider the following three examples of seasonally adjusted vs. not seasonally adjusted data.
Advance estimate for January 2023 goods exports out today. Big jump, compared to the pre-pandemic past, but not compared to the recent past.
Reader Steve Kopits writes about the debate over employment numbers:
At the same time, I thought it possible that both surveys were in fact correct, but garbled with the effect of the recovery from the suppression, thereby creating misleading impressions because we were misinterpreting the data. That still seems possible, though I’ve read that others think the CES was manipulated to provide a more rosy picture heading into the election.