EJ Antoni/Heritage Foundation (Aug 5): “I Would Not Be Surprised If A Recession Is Backdated To July Or The Current Month”

It’s possible that NBER will backdate the recession to starting in July. So far we have preliminary data for August for consumption, personal income ex-transfers, and industrial production, and don’t have Q3 GDP.

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Image Source: Pexels

From FoxNews. Here’s a picture of indicators followed by the NBER’s BCDC over the past year. Note that August numbers are mostly up.

Figure 1: Nonfarm Payroll (NFP) employment from CES (blue), civilian employment (orange), industrial production (red), personal income excluding current transfers in Ch.2017$ (bold light green), manufacturing and trade sales in Ch.2017$ (black), consumption in Ch.2017$ (light blue), and monthly GDP in Ch.2017$ (pink), GDP (blue bars), all log normalized to 2021M11=0. Source: BLS via FRED, Federal Reserve, BEA 2024Q2 3rd release/annual update, S&P Global Market Insights (nee Macroeconomic Advisers, IHS Markit) (10/1/2024 release), and author’s calculations.

It’s possible that NBER will backdate the recession to starting in July. So far we have preliminary data for August for consumption, personal income ex-transfers, and industrial production, and don’t have Q3 GDP (although all nowcasts for Q3 indicate growth). Still, NBER peak in July does seem a little unlikely to me.

By the way, Dr. Antoni also declared a recession a little more than two years ago.


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