181–190 of 509 posts
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You can quibble with the exact threshold, but it certainly isn’t 80% of pre-Covid employment: https://www.statista.com/statistics/269959/employment-in-the... https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PAYEMS
Certainly not 80%, but by all metrics, both mine and yours, it is still below what it was before.
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The NBER has called a recession every single time we had two back-to-back quarters of negative growth. The news media is known to aggressively jump to conclusions to produce headlines. It's a notable exception that they are so cautious all of a sudden about what is really a foregone conclusion.
In those instances, were there also declines in real income, employment, industrial production, and wholesale-retail sales? In the current climate, are those things declining? Maybe the answer to those questions help explain the discrepancy.
I don't have the time to link the other stats, but they're not so rosy either, except employment. One good stat and several bad ones is still a recession.
In the USA, "officially" a group of 8 economists at the National Bureau of Economic Research decides when a recession starts. I suspect other countries have their own definitions. "The NBER's definition emphasizes that a recession involves a significant decline in economic activity that is spread across the economy and lasts more than a few months. In our interpretation of this definition, we treat the three criteria…
In other words, if it looks like a recession and quacks like a recession then it might be a recession. And yes it much more complicated - especially it also depends on how much outside pressure NEBR has. I think there is a large pressure not to declare recession since we still have a high inflation and feds needs to continue raising rates.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/12/opinion/employment-wages-...
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You can't look at the oil market in isolation like that. Saudi was dumping oil at that point, producing way more than necessary. So much so futures went negative. That is not the case today.
> That is not the case today. As a deliberate political choice by the Saudis. https://theintercept.com/2022/02/15/saudi-arabia-gas-price-o...
The way that the White House, and by extension the administrative branch of the government has decided to redefine "recession" and imply that the economy is doing really well right now is actually scary. These people do have huge levers that control our lives that they can pull. Their actions do have massive effects on the American economy, and by extension the economy of the rest of the world. The actions they're ta…
> Gas if still $4.2 national average per gallon. That's HUGE, and the direct actions of the administration are to blame for this. https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/shell-reports-record... "Shell (SHEL.L) posted record results on Thursday, with a $11.5 billion second-quarter profit smashing the mark it set only three months ago, lifted by strong gas trading and a tripling of refining profit. The company also ann…
Companies with heavy capital investment will see huge gains in % profit as their debt obligations are inflated away.
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What conclusion are you trying to draw from this subjective view?
That the definition of a recession has always been 2 quarters of negative GDP. The administration now believes there is nuance in the numbers, so what was the accepted definition in the past is no longer. The fact the media on whole has decided it's ok to redefine a commonly accepted definition when the administration promotes it lends itself to the media being a mouthpiece for the administration. I am willing to und…
However, wouldn't you agree there is nuance here? In Q4, GDP rose 6.9%, a number so big that we haven't seen that in decades- it appears around the early 1980s was the last time we saw those kinds of numbers. There has been a lot of whipsaw effects as we get out of covid- supply chains are all over the place, companies placing orders to get goods in to avoid snarls, only to now find that demand for goods, which boomed during the pandemic, has now eased as people have reverted to spending on going out and traveling, etc... There seems to be a lot of mismatch in supply and demand again.
The unemployment rate is at 3.6%- an astonishingly low number- these lows were last seen in the 1960s and 1970s.
On the flipside, inflation is high, gas prices are high and that hurts a lot of people- I live in a city, so this is mostly irrelevant and driven by forces out of anyone in the US govt's control.
There is evidence of some rockier times ahead, but when I think "recession" I think of a lot more pain than what we are currently experiencing.
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I’m not an economist. A number of respected economists believed a year ago that inflation was mostly supply chain issues and was transient. Now, with new information, opinions are changing. I believe the monetary stimulus mostly occurred the first year of the pandemic but maybe it’s continuing. I don’t know. Since inflation is a global phenomenon it seems reasonable to conclude that fiscal stimulus in the U.S. is not…
The statement from Psaki in an early press conference was that the invasion explained the observed CPI number. She wasn't referring to inflation that was yet to come. She knowingly lied, probably rationalizing it as spin or a half-truth.
You mention one statement from the Press Secretary ascribe to it malice. Do you know she lied rather than was misinformed? Assume she is lying. Does this mean the whole administration lied? The discussion at hand is about Yellen (and by extension economists at NBER and other agencies). One statement by the Press Secretary is evidence of a lie by these people? I don’t think so.
It’s believable that Yellen and Biden and Pskai did lie because in politics you try to sway public perception and opinion. I don’t believe NBER has lied and to blame inflation on fiscal stimulus that largely occurred two years ago seems outright bad thinking. Especially to then blame the current administration for it. Inflation is going on all over the world. It’s not Biden’s fault. There’s a collection of reasons and mechanisms at play and Biden can only do so much.
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But we can stop lying about the definition of a recession. Biden admin changing the definition to avoid loss political points is about as nonsensical as blaming inflation squarely on Putin. The disinformation needs to stop.
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Cases were mild as the vaccine provided the expected protection. This is not new.
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> To some, this is a recession Not "to some", two back-to-back negative GDP stats has been the definition of a recession for my entire life. Now suddenly it's questionable, because the current administration would like to shrug away its failures, and too many in the media are helping them do it. This ad-hoc re-definition of language to suit political purposes is scary and Orwellian.
Has that been the definition, or has that just been your understanding, which may have been wrong? Has there really been a redefinition? I mean, if we just take Wikipedia as a gauge, they have defined it according to the NBER, dating back to 2008 [1]. A recession is a significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months, normally visible in real GDP, real income, employme…
From the Oxford dictionary (recession): a period of temporary economic decline during which trade and industrial activity are reduced, generally identified by a fall in GDP in two successive quarters.
It's only now that we're seeing all this slimy lawyering about the definition of recession. "Well acksually, technically..."