Last Thursday, I talked on WPR’s Central Time about the national economy and Wisconsin’s outlook given President Biden’s policies. I noted that the macro outlook had improved substantially since last December, as the economy proved more resilient than expected, and inflation decelerated more than anticipated. That was true nationally, as well as locally.
Econbrowser has moved to a new server
This weekend we moved the hosting for Econbrowser to a new server. This should not affect how anyone accesses or experiences the content of the site. The one consequence is that comments that were entered Saturday night or Sunday morning would have been lost. If this is the case for you, please re-enter your comment now. If you experience any other problems, please let us know.
Forecasters Up Projections of GDP, Employment
The Survey of Professional Forecasters February survey was released on Friday. The median outlook has improved considerably since early January.
Sentiment and Misery (and Maybe Partisanship)
The University of Michigan’s February consumer sentiment index (preliminary) is out today. Here’s the picture (series inverted so down is improvement) and the “misery index”, the sum of unemployment and y/y CPI inflation.
Weekly Macro Indicators thru 2/4/2023 and Monthly GDP
Weekly indicators from Lewis-Mertens-Stock (NY Fed) Weekly Economic Indicators, and Baumeister, Leiva-Leon and Sims WECI and Woloszko (OECD) Weekly Tracker through 2/4/2023, released today, compared against monthly GDP.
Debt Held by the Public as Share of GDP
From Treasury, and CBO.
Cumulative NFP Job Creation in First Four Years, by President
Just sayin’
Dispersion in Q1 Nowcasts
Here are several nowcasts of 2023Q1 GDP, placed against the January WSJ mean forecast and IMF WEO projection of 31 January.
Revisiting Exchange Market Pressure
Linda Goldberg and Signe Krogstrup have a revised version of a paper entitled “International Capital Flow Pressures and Global Factors”. They write:
Remembering (or Not) the Recession of 2022H1
Compiling a bunch of labor market data, we have the following picture of the private nonfarm labor sector, which seems to run counter to the argument last made a month ago that a recession occurred in 2022H1.