Quote:
Originally Posted by opendoor
Not in the US. Almost half of the US's post WWII recessions haven't had 2 consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth. And they've gone through 2 consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth before without it being considered a recession.
What hasn't happened in US history is a recession without an uptick in unemployment. The unemployment rate in the first 6 months of each recession:
1949: 4% -> 6.2%
1953: 2.7% -> 5.9%
1957: 4.4% -> 7.4%
1960: 5.1% -> 6.6%
1970: 3.5% -> 5.0%
1974: 5.1% -> 7.4%
1980: 6.0% -> 7.8%
1982: 7.9% -> 9.8%
1990: 5.2% -> 6.8%
2001: 4.3% -> 5.5%
2008: 5% -> 6.8%
2020: 4.4% -> 7.9%
So far in the first 2 quarters of 2022 unemployment has dropped from 4% to 3.6%. So while chances are the US will enter a recession (or may have started to already), if unemployment somehow stays low and GDP recovers in Q3, this will have never been considered a recession.
|
The 10-2 yield curve is inverted by 38 bps in the US. That, combined with the Fed steeply raising rates and the Treasury running a much more balanced (==less stimulative) fiscal position makes avoiding a recession pretty unlikely.
Really the most likely way the US avoids an "official" recession is by political power leaning on the NBER to avoid declaring one. More realistically, they will just wait to declare until their declaration is irrelevant - a course of action which is quite common for the group. NBER recession definitions are interesting in retrospect for historical purposes, but not especially useful as a definition in the moment.