Are the T—-p tariffs quickly putting the US into a recession? 

As I wrote yesterday, there are two daily and two weekly indicators, as well as five regional Fed broad economic reports released during the month, that should give us a quick heads-up.

Today’s editions is something of a baseline, since even the daily reports ended no later than April 6. Let’s take a look.

First, Redbook retail sales last week jumped to a high of 7.2% YoY, the 2nd highest comparison in the entire past year. The four week average was 5.7%, about average for the past 10 months:

Next, restaurant reservations also continue to be healthy, up 2% YoY during the past week, within the average range of YoY comparisons this year.

Next, if there are layoffs, tax withholding begins to suffer. It also suffers when stock prices decline such that supervisors and executives are unable to cash in stock options. Matt Trivisonno of the Daily Jobs Update has a graph (delayed by 3 months for non-subscribers) comparing the entire past 365 days of payments vs. the 365 previous days. As you can see, by early this year it was up about 6% YoY:

I have crunched the numbers through last Friday’s report, the latest date available, and currently the 365 day YoY comparison is up 7.1%.

I also looked at the 13 week and 4 week averages YoY. As of last Friday’s report, they were higher by 7.4% and 8.3%, respectively.

So again, no sign of a consumer pullback at this point.

Finally, even though initial jobless claims won’t be reported until Thursday, economist Aaron Sojourner pioneered a study looking at google searches for “file for unemployment”. He found no spike through the end of last week:

On the other hand, Guy Berger found a substantial YoY% increase:

I am a little leery of this, because it should correspond to the YoY% change in initial claims. The search history shows a bottom in August of last year, and a sharp acceleration in the YoY comparison starting in February, but initial claims do not show any YoY deterioration since last autumn:

(Click on image to enlarge)

The only explanation that may fit is if Federal employees who either had been, or were in fear of, being DOGE’d, searched on google, even though they have received severance benefits.

So the conclusion as I begin this watch is that there is no evidence of a significant downshift in any of the high frequency hard data at this point.

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