NBER Declares Recession Trough at 2020M04

From NBER today:

The Business Cycle Dating Committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research maintains a chronology of the peaks and troughs of US business cycles. The committee has determined that a trough in monthly economic activity occurred in the US economy in April 2020. The previous peak in economic activity occurred in February 2020. The recession lasted two months, which makes it the shortest US recession on record.

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Some Trends in Real Wages

An argument increasingly being made is that inflation is being built into wage demands in a context of really tight labor markets, and this would induce a wage-price spiral. This outcome is plausible, but I think it’s useful to compare wages against CPI to see if wages are really abnormally high, and are starting to rise in tandem with inflation. [text corrected 8/13]

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