Today, we present a guest post written by Jeffrey Frankel, Harpel Professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and formerly a member of the White House Council of Economic Advisers. Sohaib Nasim contributed to this commentary. A shorter version was published by Project Syndicate.
Recall, EJ Antoni and Peter St. Onge argued the US economy has been in recession since 2022.
Mark Zandi has asserted that whether the US goes into recession depends on how CA and NY economies evolve. If we rely on GDP to define activity, then the outlook appears sunny.
Lewis, Mertens, Stock Weekly Economic Index (WEI) is down 1.1 ppts, while Baumeister, Leiva-Leon, Sims Weekly Economic Conditions Indicator (for deviation from trend growth) is down 0.7 ppts.
We would’ve gotten Q3 advance GDP yesterday, and September personal income and outlays today, ordinarily. What indicators do we have for the state of the macroeconomy? Here’s one: delinquincies on auto loans (for pools of asset backed securities).
Data from Pew, for average marketplace benchmark plans, per month:
Per Bloomberg. Hmm. Commitment to 12 mn metric tons (MMT) “this year” (calendar, market?).
Given we’re unlikely to get a CPI release for October…
That’s the AIER Everyday Price Index ™ in September:
Figure 1: CPI all urban (blue), Everyday Price Index (tan), and CPI for limited service restaurants (green), all in logs, 2025M01=0. CPI for limited service restaurants seasonally adjusted by author using X-13. Source: BLS, AIER, and author’s calculations.
Up 2.3% in log terms.
From ” A Quantitative Analysis of the Effects of the Government Shutdown on
the Economy Under Three Scenarios, as of October 29, 2025″: