Any call, if it comes, is going to take a while. The NBER usually takes 6 to 18 months to decide when a recession starts or ends. Hall's committee didn't announce the end of the 2001 recession until a full 20 months after the fact.
Robert Hall, Chairman of Business Cycle Dating Committee
Hall says he's a hands-off manager of the process of identifying recessions. "These aren't people who can be directed," says Hall of the committee members. "These are people with a lot of expertise and awareness of what's happened in the past, but it's not a group that has a lot of disagreement." Discussion takes place by e-mail and frequently revolves around a mid-month message Hall sends to committee members containing economic data, including the monthly estimate of GDP growth, as calculated by the St. Louis consulting firm Macroeconomic Advisers.
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Monday, May 19, 2008
Recession call at ivory tower pace
BusinessWeek reports "Why So Long to Call a Recession?"
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1 comments:
Paul,
My post continues to evolve:
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The Recession of 2008 That Wasn’t?
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I propose a three pronged gentleman’s bet:
1) The final GDP figure for Q1 will remain positive (I’m betting between 0.4% and 0.6%). We’ll know on June 26th.
2) The NBER never declares a recession to have taken place at any point in 2008.
3) The economic forecast from The Conference Board proves to be accurate within plus or minus 0.3% for each remaining quarter of 2008.
Note: As of today, 5/20/08, the predictions are:
Q2: +0.4%
Q3: +1.4%
Q4: +1.5%
(Meaning, no recession in 2008.)
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