Skip to content

10 thoughts on “My crystal ball takes a look at the Q4 employment level

  1. D_Ohrk_E1

    Yet, the longer view shows something completely different.

    If we open the window further and change it to an index set to 100 at April 2020 (the "end" of the pandemic recession per NBER), you can clearly see that we're not even close to matching very long term employment levels.

    If you are to be believed that the business cycle will end soon, it will be the shortest on record in the last 40 years. Why -- because the Fed catastrophically raised rates too high? The past does not reflect that an effective rate at around 5% is a progenitor of a recession.

    You need a new crystal ball.

  2. skeptonomist

    To predict the future you really need to have some knowledge of how things have worked in the past. The recent changes in employment level have no analogy since 1950 at least:

    https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=17ghi

    The "normal" pattern in rate of change is quite different from what has happened since 2019. The employment rate has just passed the pre-covid level and is not dangerously high:

    https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=17ghv

    As Kevin has said there are reasons for expecting a recession, for example the apparent determination of the Fed to cause one, but this extrapolation is not one of them.

    1. James B. Shearer

      "Where are those parabolic trend lines you’ve grown so fond of recently?"

      He's fitting lines to the derivative so if you integrate back to the employment level (rather than the change in the employment level) you will get parabolas.

      1. joey5slice

        Aren't inflation metrics also measuring a rate of change? He has been using curved trend lines to show that inflation is actually about to end all on its own for over a year now.

  3. jeffreycmcmahon

    The rare KD "That thing you're not worried about, here's why you should be (it doesn't worry me though)".

  4. mcbrie

    Why assume an unbroken trend? Looks to me like two separate trends: steady decline from March to November 2022, then flat from then until now.

Comments are closed.