Everybody is happy to agree with me when I say that China fudges their numbers, but when I say other countries are capable of the same thing they tell me I'm crazy. I am not an expert on China by any means, and I don't believe other countries report their economic health in the same way; but I also don't buy that everything the US and other western countries say is gospel.
Making it much more complicated is the fact that methodologies vary from year to year, and are often created by averaging data from a number of different sources. I've become fairly convinced that almost all macroeconomic measures are so flawed that using them in almost any dimension (across time, between countries) is useless. It may be that everyone involved in creating the overall measures is acting in good faith, rather than some politically motivated conspiracy, but still in aggregate create data that does not reflect reality in a useful way.
The exceptions tend to be metrics that require skin in the game to shift -- the yield curve inversion or S&P500 index, for example, are fairly real, since shifting them would cost a ton of money.
I agree with you on the S&P500, but isn't the yield curve fairly easily manipulated by the Federal Reserve and their rate setting activities?
I think you'll find the Labor Force Partcipation Rate gives a more accurate assessment of what you're looking for.
"Make-Believe America: Why the US Unemployment Rate Doesn’t Indicate Economic Recovery"
https://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2018/03/08/make-believe...
If there was a systematic fudging of those numbers lots and lots of people would notice.
While information freedom doesn’t mean the official metrics are accurate, lack of freedom is a warning sign and should be treated with extreme skepticism.
Also most of the important numbers that the average person cares about such as inflation or unemployment are collected in a very rigorous way that is hard for a government officials to modify without leaving a damning paper trail. Not to mention the vast majority of private measures match up with these numbers.
These measures are by no means perfect. The unemployment rate has significantly over estimated the health of the economy since the great recession, but this isn't due to a conspiracy. It's caused because it systematically under counts people who have dropped out of the labor force, or are under employed. (This is for the most popular unemployment rate number, there are much better employment numbers to use that don't suffer from this issue.)
This is untrue. There are various measures of unemployment, each of which includes/excludes different factors. Believe it or not, some people actually use this data for work, and sometimes not including, say, people who aren't even looking for work, makes sense depending on what you're analyzing.
>Everybody is happy to agree with me when I say that China fudges their numbers, but when I say other countries are capable of the same thing they tell me I'm crazy
I know folks who work for StatsCan and the BLS. You should provide evidence before accusing hard-working people of corruption. There's nothing intellectual about pointing to random things and saying, "could be a conspiracy!" Yeah, anything could be.
100 years? Yes!!!!
50 years? Yes!!!
25 years? Yes!!
12.5 years? Yes!
6.25 years? Yes
3.125 years? Yes?
1.5625 years? Maybe
.78125 years? Maybe?
.390625 years? No?
0.1953125 years? No
0.09765625 years? No!
Further, we're now in a society where a third of the population lives in a perma-recession where they have not actually recovered from the previous one -- while another section of society lives in permanently good times -- so it is hard to gauge recession from looking around you.
By the way, a recession is technically 2 quarters of negative growth, so assuming we start from when we actually know we're in recession, it's a minimum of 6 months from now before we are in recession so ".390625 years" would be a definite no.
The predictions may have been correct if it weren't for the fact that the predictions themselves perturbed the system.
I am likely too soon though...
I could see an argument made that given that this is statistic is relative to itself and just tracks movement it shouldn't matter if things are different now than in the past but it feels to me like the nature of this metric is so different now than it was in the past that it's just not an apples to apples comparison.
If what you are saying is that we are in a historically unprecedented time you’ll note their metric predicted recessions that happened across a wide variety of historical regimes.
It might be just a coincidence, but it's easy to get/change jobs at the moment, if you're actually willing to work.
A promotion grants you a whopping 10cent rate increase. A whole 0.8 euro per day if you pass a test!! Oh and you don’t get more than 30 hours per week coz then they’d have to pay benefits.
No shit they have a hard time hiring. Most young people will rather try being an instagram influencer than work for those wages. Got nothing to lose at that point
As a "millennial" who graduated in 2008, I seriously hate reading shit like this. Maybe it recovered for the Boomer's pension funds and 401k's, but it took many of my friends over a decade to find work equal to their qualifications. They're only JUST NOW starting to get payed what they deserve (PHDs, MBAs, and Masters degree holders).
No, it didn't, certainly not at the point the recession is deemed to end.
The end of a recession is when the aggregate recovery begins, not when it is complete. (And yeah, recovery from recession doesn't mean most people are doing better, as it's an aggregate about the economy that isn't concerned with distribution—the long “recovery” between the short recession of 2001, IIRC, and the Great Recession saw every quintile but the top without gains, and the bottom three declining.)
The isn't a Boomer vs Millenial thing (it's more of a bourgeoisie vs. proletariat thing.)
Levels of pay have nothing to do with whether or not we’re in a recession.
That is absurd. In a free market with free movement of goods and people, whatever you are getting paid is what you "deserve" aka what other participants in the market are willing to pay for your services.
It is only explicit government intervention that overrides this process; subsided renewal energy sources, childcare, housing etc.
But with everything else being equal your friends were getting exactly what the market could afford. Just because you have a PHD or Masters does not mean someone else owes you a high paying salary.
"afford" is an odd word choice. As if to suggest that employers simply don't have any money by which they could have increased worker salaries.
In this same period, average CEO compensation increased 25-50%, depending on how you measure it. So, apparently, there's lots of money, but its distribution is skewing increasingly to the very top.
So let's not say "afford".
Skipping over oil company subsidies and big bank bailouts when you're cherry picking your government intervention examples makes you appear rather biased.
No, I don't mean that they are owed anything. This is life after all. You nor I, are owed a damn thing. And in a free market, that's explicitly true.
Duh.
What I mean by "deserve" is... prior generations with similar qualifications enjoyed a much smoother, and more lucrative career. Boomers were handed a golden egg, and managed to nearly destroy it. The middle class is shrinking, wages are stagnant, and frankly if you're not underemployed as a millennial you're among the lucky.
The problem with a recession is that it tips the negotiating leverage towards the employers because there is an oversupply of workers. I don't want to speak for them, but I'm assuming the OP means getting to the pay level they would be at had the recession not occurred.
In a sense, both wage rates are "deserved" in the context of the economic reality, but there is a certain amount of luck involved, just like for those planning on retiring in 2008.
Of course, everything went to shit so quickly that it took a hell of a long time to come back.
Actually, it didn't really come back unless you're in the elite.
It is remarkable that the domestic product increases so reliably between quarters at all
It is correlated and conflated with asset prices and needs to hire anyone but it stops there. Nuanced talking points have no room for discussing when a recession ended or not.
What you are referring to is an entirely different discussion, no matter how relatable it is to people.
George Soros wrote extensive literature on the topic. He called his fund (second best performing hedge fund in history) the Quantum Fund because, according to him, true nature of economic reality is unknowable to humans. As in it is genuinely impossible to know, regardless of the amount of efforts.
Example: mortgage credit decisions depend on people's earnings and collateral value. Problem? Both earnings (salaries) and the collateral value (home prices) depend on the amount of credit in the system.
The economy, being a subset of psychology/sociology, cannot be understood via normal science because the level of understanding is not independent from the actual rules at work. I.e. the more we understand the different-er we behave. Unlike atoms, which don't care what humans think and just go about their own business.
Also, concerningly, the real estate market is just as leveraged and bubbled as then as well.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jessecolombo/2019/06/30/current...
It's like standing in a room on the top floor of the Titanic and measuring whether the boat is sinking by measuring the water level on the floor in your room. Meanwhile, if water is getting into the rooms below you...
This is not true. Please be more specific with 'all over the world' statement. Do you speak about 5% or 7% of world economy?
This is more like "how will we know when a recession has already started without waiting for a down GDP for two quarters." That's 6 months in. This signal lets you know 4-5 months in. Not exactly a leading indicator.
It's at least 6 months in: NBER recession dating even for recessions that include at least two down quarters (which, while a popular conception is not the official definition, though I don't think any two-quarter consecutive downturn has failed to be included within a declared recession) is often before the first down quarter in a consecutive pair. (E.g., the Great Recession is timed from the Q4 2007 peak, even though there was only one quarter of decline immediately following, then a dead-cat bounce quarter, then a four quarter consecutive decline. If you looked for a pair of down quarters, you'd detect the Great Recession a year after it started; 4-5 months moves that up a lot.)
"virtually never" also sounds like weasel words considering the total number of recessions.
The global economy is reaching uncharted territory now with the amount of debt and negative interest rates.
Maybe a depression like 1930’s are a relic of the past once we decoupled from the gold standard. Central banks today have full power to devalue currency indefinitely in order to maintain the financial status quo.
They've probably got more tools, as they've said that the foreign experience puts negative interest rates on the table as a realistic tool.
But, even if they can't, Congress could, in principal, step in with serious fiscal stimulus [0], which is less limited than the monetary tools available to the Fed. But they've been unreliable in the last few recessions, leaving the Fed holding the bag.
I mean they don't have much to give do they? Unless we're doing negative interest rates this time.
It just shows the inverted yield curve, pulling down data from the US treasury everyday, and subtracting the 1 year from the 10 year interest rate.
Anyone with any real predictive power over that question had a license to print money
I've also seen this VOX documentary about the "yield curve" which also famous for predicting recessions.
"Recovery is when Jimmy Carter loses his job"
Or at least, it's been claimed that it's happened before.
PR obviously also plays a huge role.
https://www.nytimes.com/1991/10/09/business/recession-and-re...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_1990s_recession_in_the_U...
https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/the-economy-and-the-elect...
https://www.bizpacreview.com/2019/08/19/fox-friends-not-afra...
https://www.dailywire.com/news/50222/bill-maher-recession-wo...
https://www.nationalreview.com/news/stocks-drop-as-recession...
https://www.salon.com/2019/08/24/history-suggests-that-a-rec...
Prior 12 months lowest unemployment rate: 3.6% (in April & May 2019).
Prior 3 months average (June/July/August 2019): 3.7%.
So according to this metric we are not in a recession.
https://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/cps_charts.pdf
For example, slide 15, percentage of the unemployed deemed as long term unemployed declined from 45% to 20% from 2012 - 2019.
Those that have been around a while know this whole story plays out on a loop over and over and over :-)
What are we going to do now without the recession?
In a way, that thing was a solution.
The system got broken by the 2009 rescue attempts (QE 1,2,3).
We are in a different regime right now (negative interest rates). I would not bet on any recession now or in the future.
I see social democracy as a necessary palliative that will prevent people from resorting to self-destructive populism. We've got to find some way to bring people back into the fold. I don't buy the idea that investing in our own people leads to authoritarianism.
I couldn't find it now but it seemed like a massive success at the time almost eliminating all mosquitoes from the a city in Brazil (iirc).
Anyone know what happened to it? If that were to come to fruition than a lot of disease in addition to malaria like chikungunya, dengue, etc will be cured too.
