The recovery continues, with a recession that is hard to see (even including the revision of the first benchmark without the caveat). A summary of the indicators tracked by the NBER’s Business Cycle Index Committee, and monthly GDP.
Figure 1: Nonfarm Payroll (NFP) activity from CES (blue), mean NFP from the first benchmark (blue), employment (orange), industrial production (red), personal income excluding current transfers in -Ch.2017$ (bright green), production and trade sales in Ch.2017$ (black), consumption in Ch.2017$ (blue), and monthly GDP in Ch.2017$ (pink ), GDP (green bars), all log normalized to 2021M11=0. Source: BLS via FRED, Federal Reserve, BEA 2024Q2 version 3/annual update, S&P Global Market Insights (macroeconomic advisors, IHS Markit) (10/1/2024), and author’s calculations.
If you were wondering what other indicators of total unpaid farm employment look like, here is a comparison.
Figure 2: Nonfarm payroll employment (bold black), preliminary benchmark (tan), preliminary benchmark (blue), NFP-adjusted household activity series (green), NFP-adjusted household activity series, adjusted to include CBO population estimates for mid-2024 (light green), and QCEW total employment adjusted periodically by the author using X-13 (red). An early adjustment of the benchmark reported by the NFP is the average of the total states of the total states as reported by the CES. Source: BLS, BLS via FRED, Philadelphia Fed, and author’s statistics.
There is a big gap between NFP and the home series prepared for the NFP concept. Part of that can be attributed to the fact that the establishment of NFP counts jobs, while the domestic concept of NFP counts people. However, significant differences may be due to the use of population controls that underestimate the total population. Adjusted for CBO’s BLS/Census undercount estimates, one gets a series near the NFP establishment (see light green line) through June 2024.
With this early September data, it’s hard to argue that the recession is here.
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