Predicting Recessions The Easy Way: Monetarists, MMT, And The Money Stock

I have a new post up that has implications for stock-market investment, so I decided to try posting it over at Seeking Alpha, where they’re paying me a few tens of dollars for the post (plus more based on page views — not much luck so far).

The post argues that year-over-year change in Real Household Net Worth has been a great predictor of NBER-designated recessions over the last half century. (It’s either 7 for 7, or 8 for 7, over 50+ years, depending on the threshold you use.) If you were following this measure, you would have gotten out of the market on March 6, 2008, avoiding a 50% drawdown over the next twelve months.

But the post goes farther, offering a somewhat monetarist economic explanation but using total household net worth as the measure of the “money stock.” Short story: if households have less (more) money, they spend less (more). Not exactly a radical behavioral economic assertion.

If you’re wondering how recent days’ market events have caused billions (trillions?) of dollars to “disappear,” and are pondering how to think about that, you might find it an interesting read.

Cross-posted at Asymptosis.