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Some people feel that we are in a recession now: stock market investors, real estate agents, and mortgage brokers. But the overall economy is not in a recession yet, and the latest statistics tell that story.

The November 2022 employment figures show a net gain of 263,000 jobs. The increase is less than in earlier months of the year, but it’s still positive, whereas employment usually falls in a recession.

Layoffs have made headlines. Amazon executives said, “Alexa, lay off 10,000 employees.” Recent headlines have mentioned Intel, H&M, CNN and others. But the best measure of layoffs across the entire economy is the Department of Labor’s report on initial claims for unemployment insurance. The latest figure as of this writing is 228,750, in an economy with roughly 150 million workers. The average weekly figure, counting both good times and bad, is over 350,000. And our workforce is much larger than the period over which the average is calculated (1967-2022).

Even more, data are provided by the Labor Department’s JOLTs report. In October 2022, six million people were hired and only 5.7 million people separated—and that number includes both layoffs and voluntary quits. The number of job openings continues to exceed the number of unemployed people by a large margin.

Employment is just one element considered by the Business Cycle Dating Committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a private group of academics. They give strong emphasis on employment and three other measures. The second indicator is inflation-adjusted income not counting transfer payments. That measure has been flat this year due to the inflation adjustment. Industrial production, the third measure, rose earlier this year, then flattened out. And finally, business sales adjusted for inflation rose briskly through June, and then leveled off. The entire group of important indicators shows the economy not growing much, but neither is it shrinking.

Today’s statistics do not tell us that a recession won’t begin tomorrow, but they confirm that no recession has begun yet. The Fed’s strong tightening will certainly have consequences, most likely a recession beginning late in 2023 or early 2024, as I wrote in a recent article. But let’s not feel miserable until misery actually arrives.

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