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Recession? What recession?

From the quality newspaper.

The National Bureau of Economic Research’s business cycle committee, the official arbiter of US downturns, defines a recession as a significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy that lasts more than a few months.

While there’s no formal definition of a soft landing, most economists see it as the moderation of inflation without a recession or serious harm to the labour market.

The path isn’t easy: A study by former Fed vice chair Alan Blinder of 11 monetary policy tightenings from 1965 to 2022 found that four resulted in something approximating that successful outcome with stable or lower inflation, the rest in hard landings and or a re-acceleration in inflation two years later.


So i suppose the odds are about 4/10.
 
i remember an old saying , any landing you can walk away from , is a good landing ... so is 'soft' one where you break a leg or ankle ??
Yea, relates to test planes. The second part is if you can fly the plane the next day it was a great landing.

So your definition sounds good to me.
 
We are in a per capita recession apparently, if you include the new migrants in the calculation.

From the article:
Real gross domestic product – the value of the nation’s production of goods and services – grew by only 0.4 per cent – the same as it grew in the previous, March quarter. Looking back, this means annual growth slowed from 2.4 per cent to 2.1 per cent.

If you know that annual growth usually averages about 2.5 per cent, that doesn’t sound too bad. But if you take a more up-to-date view, the economy’s been growing at an annualised (made annual) rate of about 1.6 per cent for the past six months. That’s just limping along.
And it’s not as good as it looks. More than all the 0.4 per cent growth in GDP during the June quarter was explained by the 0.7 per cent growth in the population as immigration recovers.

So when you allow for population growth, you find that GDP per person actually fell by 0.3 per cent. The same was true in the previous quarter – hence all the people saying we’re suffering a “per capita recession”.

As my colleague Shane Wright so aptly puts it, the economic pie is still growing but, with more people to share it, the slices are thinner.
It’s possible that continuing population growth will stop GDP from actually contracting, helping conceal from the headline writers how tough so many households are faring.

But the media’s notion that we’re not in recession unless GDP falls for two quarters in a row has always been silly. What makes recessions such terrible things is not what happens to GDP, but what happens to workers’ jobs.
 
and no mention of inflation in that:
if your GDP increases by 2.1% (in nominal figures) but with an inflation of 7% :
do we all agree we go backward???
 
Sometimes one needs to spend some time on the correlation does not implycausation, but the correlation is still interesting.
Mick
View attachment 164070
from my contacts in that industry ( management level now , local trucking has a severe shortage of capable workers

now that could be because they expect truckers to be purer than saints ( or those with a licence to carry a concealable firearm

i would have expected drivers to be retrenched due to costs and a decline in freight , but am assured drivers are actually being 'head-hunted' by rival companies
 
The above graph is based on US statistics.
Not sure if it also applies to OZ, if thats what your contacts were suggesting.
Mick
 
in Australia i would have thought rising costs ( apart from wages ) to be the dominant factor

now i no longer get independent info from the UK , but they had a driver shortage last i heard

with the US being a large nation , one might wonder about there as well

but employees down ( for whatever reason ) implies less local/interstate freight being moved ( and that should reduce sales as well , but maybe not prices , because supply is still bottle-necked )
 
Just a bit more info on the rucking fleets.
there has been a big run up in truck fleets at the snmall end of the carrier market.
From Freight waves


So it would appear that as some of the big fleet cariers decline (Yellow the biggest one), UPS shopw a decline in parcels,
the smaller more nimble owner occupier trucks are making a comeback.
Statistics, they can tell you anything you want to hear.
Mick
 
BTW , i still think the recession is already here , just been re-labeled for political convenience
 
In the tragic catastrophic aircraft crash investigations, often the analysis talks about the swiss cheese effect.
The possibility of a holes lining up in a multiple number of slices of swiss cheese will be statistivcally small.
In the same way, a number of small faults that on their own might merely be an irritation, but if they happen simultaneously very quickly escalate into a disaster.
I see a number of recent events in America and internationally as looking like some of the holes on the swiss cheese are lining up.
1. from Market Watch Consumer confidence in the USA has fallen to a 5 month low.
2. From CNN Business Consumers are spending more on groceries, but they are buying less.
3. from CNBC More and more American consumers are living from paycheck to paycheck (and I suspect the story is similar in OZ)
4. From Zero hedge Target has joined walmart in warning that consumers have cut back on spending
5. The same Zero hedge report highlighted how consumer credit card spending had tanked.





6. The services sector in the US is a driver of GDP, more so than the goods side of sales.


A recession may or may not be happening (depending on the deffiniton being used), but the data points to a more and more likely event of the US and the rest of the world being in recession next year.
Mick
 
And right on cue, it seems that Asian factory output is falling.
Japan and South Korea had already gone into contraction over previous months, now China has joined the contraction brigade.

From AFR
Mick
 
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