No doubt in my mind that recession is here, my question is how long it will last. Last we had recession was in 2000-2001 during dot com bomb exploded. but I felt it was pretty brief. When FED acknowledged recession, the recession was already half way through. It lasted maybe a year. I think this recession actually started the end of last year, maybe in 4th quarter of this year, things will start to turn around? Your thoughts?
If the recession indeed started in Dec 2007 then I am wondering why NFP are still just -70k and NE claims are around 400k. Five months into the recession in 2001 we were losing 200k jobs every month like clockwork in 2001 and claims came in >500k. Either these statistics will pick up in a gigantic way very soon or this 'recession' is nothing more than a lot of hot air.
the wonderful thing about macroeconomics is that when you think you have everything figured out, there's one tiny piece of information you were not aware of, like the sub prime time bomb. And for it's next trick..
Barry over at bigpicture.typepad.com has a good discussion of these very statistics. The way the NFP numbers are calculated changed between 2001 and 2008. Basically, prior to 2002 the birth-death model was not a significant contributor of jobs growth. This model accounts for jobs created in industries/companies too new to be covered by their survey strategy. In 2007 the B/d model accounted for 80% of job growth. The B/d contribution is at best, suspicious. Consider the jobs growth being reported by industry: +28k jobs in construction, and +6k in financial activities. We know those industries are being decimated, yet the B/d model dreams up job growth. In short, a huge measured job loss plus a slightly less than huge imaginary/ficticious job gain = -70k jobs.
Here's some work I've done: http://scriabinop23.blogspot.com/2008/01/yield-curve-inversion-recession.html All recent (last 50 yrs) recessions last between 8-16 months. http://scriabinop23.blogspot.com/2008/04/market-bottoms-related-to-default-rates.html