Image Source: Pixabay
 

If you think that’s Kevin Hassett opining, you’d be wrong. It’s actually CEA Chair Ed Lazear on May 8, 2008. NBER retrospectively determined that the business cycle peak was December 2007, so that a recession was underway for four months by that time. Today, NEC Chair Kevin Hassett stated “I don’t see any sign of recession”

I remember speaking with a NBER Business Cycle Dating Committee (BCDC) member at the time of Lazear’s statement, and I recall that member — in a big understatement — saying “I don’t think that was a good idea”.

See the graph of key indicators followed by the NBER BCDC (employment is one of the top two, the other is personal income ex-current transfers) below.  I also show in Figure 2 some alternative indicators.
 

Figure 1: Nonfarm Payroll incl benchmark revision employment from CES (bold blue), civilian employment with smoothed population controls (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 2025Q2 second release, S&P Global Market Insights (nee Macroeconomic Advisers, IHS Markit) (9/2/2025 release), and author’s calculations. 

Figure 2: Nonfarm Payroll early benchmark (NFP) (bold blue), civilian employment adjusted to NFP concept, with smoothed population controls (bold orange), manufacturing production (red), personal income excluding current transfers in Ch.2017$ (bold green), real retail sales (black), vehicle miles traveled (green), freight transportation services index (brown), and coincident index in Ch.2017$ (pink), GDO (teal bars), all log normalized to 2021M11=0. Source: Philadelphia Fed [1], Philadelphia Fed [2], Federal Reserve, BTS via FRED, BEA 2025Q2 second release, and author’s calculations.
 

See also Larry Kudlow today.

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