Both industrial production and manufacturing production are in line with the Bloomberg consensus (-0.2% m/m vs. +0.1, -0.5% vs. +0.1, respectively). With this data, we have a picture of some key metrics after the NBER BCDC.
figure 1: Nonfarm employment (dark blue), industrial production (red), 2012 personal income excluding transfers (green), 2012 manufacturing and trade sales (black), 2012 consumption (light blue), and 2012 Monthly GDP (pink) for January of the year, all log normalized to 2020M02=0. NBER defines the decay date, peak to trough, shades of gray. Sources: BLS, Federal Reserve, BEA, via FRED, IHS Markit (nee Macroeconomic Advisers) (published July 1, 2022), NBER, and author’s calculations.
Given the rapid rebound in all of these series, it’s hard to see how things are evolving when we consider whether we’re slipping back into recession. Here I have plotted last year’s data value.
figure 2: Nonfarm employment (dark blue), industrial production (red), 2012 personal income excluding transfers (green), 2012 manufacturing and trade sales (black), 2012 consumption (light blue), and 2012 Monthly GDP (pink) for January 2021, all log normalized to 2021M06=0. Sources: BLS, Federal Reserve, BEA, via FRED, IHS Markit (nee Macroeconomic Advisers) (published July 1, 2022), NBER, and author’s calculations.
While some series look like they may have peaked in the past (manufacturing and trade industry sales, monthly GDP), others are clearly still rising (non-farm payrolls, NFP). The NBER BCDC notes that in these series, NFP and personal income (excluding current transfers) are weighted more heavily. Both continue to rise, with NFP increasing by more than 4% (logarithmically) over the past year. Industrial production also rose by more than 4% over the past year, although it fell in the last two months of data.
In other news, retail sales beat expectations (1% vs. 0.8% vs. -0.1% m/m previously).
As of today, Q2 GDPNow is -1.5%, IHS Markit is -1.9% and Goldman Sachs is tracking +0.7. Wells Fargo’s forecast today is +0.2, and Deutsche Bank’s forecast as of today is -0.6%.
