October industrial production: consistent with a very slow expansion  – by New Deal democrat I call industrial production the King of Coincident Indicators, because more often than any other metric it coincides with the peaks and troughs of economic activity as determined by the NBER, the official arbiter of recessions. Unlike retail sales, the news […]

How Changes In Changes In Inventories Have Brought US The “Recession” That Is Probably Not A Recession by Barkley Rosser, Econospeak  Based on just announced preliminary results, it looks like the US will have experiences negative GDP growth for the first two quarters of 2022. Based on a “rule of thumb” introduced in a New […]

Krugman recently presented this graph, showing household debt as a percentage of GDP. and made this comment. Second, a dramatic rise in household debt, which many of us now believe lies at the heart of our continuing depression. There are those who seem to believe that if Krugman says it, it must be wrong.   Here […]

by Mike Kimel Predicting Recessions, The Great Stagnation, and Will There Be a Double Dip? There’s a lot of talk about a double dip recession these days. I don’t think there’s a precise definition of a double dip recession, but I think if there was it would be something like this: “a recession, followed by […]

Mark Thoma in The Fiscal Times takes a stab at explaining this recession and policy: As this year comes to a close, and as we finally begin the recovery stage of the recession, it’s a good time to look back and ask how policymakers could have improved their response to the downturn. What can we […]

Even during the last “jobless recovery,” people did not continue to become discouraged. Things have changed.

We are now almost 24 months into the Great Recession. While many expect NBER will eventually say that The Great Recession ended several months ago, they have not yet. By contrast, the recession that began The Great Depression, per NBER, lasted 43 months. It seems only fair to compare the two, so I trust I […]

By Spencer The weekly initial unemployment claims are widely reported and various charts show how they have been falling since the peak. But it is hard to compare the drop in claims this cycle compared to after other severe recessions in the standard charts showing claims over time. So to make such comparisons easier I […]

I try to like the NYTimes Economics Reporting. I really do. Heck, any place that publishes Uwe Reinhardt can’t be all bad. But David Leonhardt, as he does often enough that I hesitate to read his work, again goes beyond the pale today, and clearly does so deliberately. The offending paragraph: Twenty-two months after the […]

By Spencer. We are getting an interesting debate between different economic bloggers today and I thought I would put in my two cents worth. Casey Mulligan at economix began it with an argument that the current recession is not as severe as the 1981-82 recession because that recession was really two recessions and if you […]