Maybe it came and went

Our weekly look at new California claims for unemployment benefits remains in the pre-pandemic (boom) range. So, it's hard to see, indeed, you can't see, any sign of recession in this series. And there hasn't been a recession since the pandemic-induced recession of 2020.

But wait! Recessions are called officially by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and so they occur, again officially, when a committee of the NBER says they occur. It used to be a rule of thumb, however, that two quarters of negative real GDP growth would eventually be ruled by the committee to be a recession. With the Federal Reserve raising interest rates to combat inflation, almost everyone thought a recession was inevitable. But in fact, there WERE in fact two consecutive quarters of negative growth in the first half of 2022, as the chart below shows:

It's just that the NBER committee looked at the labor market indicators - such as the data we have been following - and decided that there really couldn't be a recession with low unemployment, labor shortages, etc. The thing is that when you start with a labor shortage and there is a real downturn, employers mainly "lay off" vacant positions and not real people. So maybe there was a different kind of recession, one that NBER didn't recognize as such, which we have already had and that is now behind us. Just a thought...

In any case, as always, the latest claims data are at https://www.dol.gov/ui/data.pdf.