Recession of 2008? Evidence Is Still Weak
If I were an economic advisor to a presidential candidate, I couldn't say it: The economy may not be in recession.
The generally acknowledged decider is the Business Cycle Dating Committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a non-profit organization. They look at four coincident indicators, plus other indicators that the individual members may be interested in (tea leaves, the entrails of small animals, Chinese horoscopes, etc.) Here are the big four:
Total business sales have clearly turned up. (We don't have the official figures for June yet, but I plugged in the nominal values, adjusted for inflation with the personal consumption deflator, and got in the ballpark.) Industrial production has also turned up the last two months. ( I think NBER should look at manufacturing production rather than total industrial production, because total is pushed up and down by utilities' production, which is heavily influenced by weather. If August is hotter than than normal, then electricity demand goes up for air conditioning, and industrial production increases. Manufacturing production has been up for the last three months.)
The decline in employment is troubling, but the magnitude of the drop is small compared to past recessions.
The worst problem is the drop in real personal income (excluding transfers). The July figures, when we get them, will include last month's high inflation, due to high gasoline prices, so the real income level will be down. August numbers are likely to be better, now that gasoline prices have retreated. Nonetheless, personal income is the best argument for us being in recession right now.
In total, my best guess is that when it's all over, we'll call it a growth recession, meaning that the growth rate of the economy slowed significantly, but it wasn't quite a real recession.
Comments
Bill,
Any indicators that this might just be the early stages of something bigger?
I’m thinking of fundamental factors like inflation, debt service demands, marginal cash flow, unresolved credit defaults, etc.
I think your viewpoint is very independent, as you don’t have an axe to grind, so your ideas are very fresh and interesting.
However, based on my own sources, I’m expecting a long and ugly recession at this point.
At the risk of dominating your feedback section, here is a single example of the kind of information I am basing my decision-making on, from Colorado Springs (from a reader on Bill Fleckenstein’s website):
“Here’s another data point for you from a mid-size city. Here in Colorado Springs the sales tax is down 8% in July from a year ago, and city officials are considering layoffs, furloughs, program cuts, and facility closings to combat the shortfall. The drop in sales tax was led by a 32.5% drop in collections by building material merchants and 16.3% from auto dealers. Housing construction for the first seven months is down 42% from a year ago.
“While home prices climbed in the late 90s into 2002, this wasn’t a bubble region, compared to others, over the past several years. So now we’ll see even the areas that weren’t involved in the mania begin to get hurt as the recession metastasizes.
“The Option Arm resets aren’t scheduled to peak until 2011, unless they hit the negative amortization trigger and recast before then. I don’t know what these experts who are calling for a bottom in housing or the market are smoking, but I have a clue.”