Unemployment

The US economy - while still far from recession - is still downshifting. At the same time, the Federal Reserve - while less hawkish than in December - is still in tightening mode. This combination still makes recession a reasonable worst…

While the US economy has decelerated enough since mid-2015 to put me on recession watch, it has not reached the point of recession. Moreover, the data do not indicate a recession is in the offing in the near-term. Rather, a combination of…

The recent data coming out of the US has been almost unrelentingly negative outside of the recent jobs reports. The Atlanta Fed GDP now report was already down to 0.7% for Q4 when poor output and retail sales data came out. I expect the…

I hate backtracking, but I need to make a correction to the analysis I just sent out. An alert reader, who also tracks the jobs data I am using, wrote me, noting that my data series seemed to chop off the last several months of 2015, making…

Editor's note: The data in the first time series depicted here is cut off in 2015, changing the tenor of the analysis. Please see the correction following this piece, that has a more negative cast regarding the US. The U.S. economy may be…

The jobs report today was a strong one, underscoring the ability of the US economy to power through. Am I uneasy about where we are in the economic and credit cycle and the accuracy of the Fed’s forward guidance? Yes - and I tend to think…

I don’t believe the jobs report today is indicative of an improving US economy. I believe it is a one-off that is so strong that it will be difficult for the Fed to overlook it. And this makes the likelihood of rate hikes that much greater,…

Ever since Willem Buiter’s call for a global recession within the next two years, people have been parsing the data for some indication that the US has been fatally compromised by contagion from emerging markets. Nothing in Buiter’s piece…

Yesterday I retweeted an interesting tweet by Business Insider’s Henry Blodget which references an article on data compiled by Barclays on profit mean reversion and recession. The gist of the article is that a profits recession generally…

As Q2 continued along, it became ever more evident that private forecasts above 3% annualized were overly optimistic and that the Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow forecast below 1% would get revised up. We met in the middle at 2.3%. What’s more is Q1…