Business Cycle Indicators - Friday, September 4
With today’s employment situation release, here’s a picture of five indicators tracked by the NBER’s Business Cycle Dating Committee (BCDC):
(Click on image to enlarge)
Figure 1: Nonfarm payroll employment (dark blue), industrial production (red), personal income excluding transfers in Ch.2012$ (green), manufacturing and trade sales in Ch.2012$ (black), and monthly GDP in Ch.2012$ (pink), all log normalized to 2019M02=0. Source: BLS, Federal Reserve, BEA, via FRED, Macroeconomic Advisers (9/1 release), NBER, and author’s calculations.
The employment number is virtually indistinguishable from the Bloomberg consensus shown in my September 1st post on indicators (1371 vs 1400 thousand). Hence, on the establishment survey, there was no surprise – as opposed to the unemployment rate that came from the household survey.
Disclosure: None.