– by a New Deal Democrat
If the housing news this morning was bad, the news from the king of the matching indicators, industrial production, was pretty good.
Total output rose 0.6% to a new record high. Industrial production rose 0.7% and is below its April peak by just -0.1%:
Barring downward revisions, this, along with the latest hit jobs report, makes it *very* unlikely that the US has been in recession since July.
This is further shown by the year-on-year changes in each of them. Currently, total production has grown by 3.9% and industrial production by 3.2%. Recessions usually start from much weaker comparisons, although 1973 (oil embargo) and 2008 (housing collapse) did start from similar comparisons on a year-over-year basis:
With oil and gas prices continuing to fall over the past few weeks, I don’t see such a sudden drop in the immediate present.