CERF Blog

Written October 21, 2022 The fundamental question for the U.S. macroeconomic forecast is if the pandemic recovery can continue or if the economy is heading into a recession. This outcome will be determined largely by Federal Reserve actions during the quarters ahead. Given how long the Fed waited to fight the current bought of inflation,… Read more

Many economists declared the recession over after the third-quarter GDP release. We at CERF disagreed and pointed out that almost every long recession has had at least one quarter of positive growth during the recession. We also pointed out that many of the reasons for the relatively strong third quarter were temporary. We just didn’t… Read more

After the kids went to bed last night, I checked the web to see if there was anything new. The Wall Street Journal posts the next day’s op-eds the evening before print publication. So, I checked those out. I started reading a piece by Judy Shelton provocatively titled The Fed’s Woody Allen Policy. Hey, I… Read more

Today’s news will be dominated by the BLS’s unemployment data release. I’m sure we’ll have more to say on that. Right now, I’d like to discuss a less-publicized data release, one that probably has more information than the unemployment data. Yesterday, the FDIC released bank charge-off data, and it was disappointing and scary. I’ve posted… Read more

Mark Zandi declared “the recession is over” on Tuesday September 1, 2009. All of the economists at CERF would like this to be true. However, we suspect that this is not true. Mark’s declaration was based in part on the ISM manufacturing activity index data release. The economy has benefited from expenditures on vehicles in… Read more