Note from dshort: This commentary has been revised to include March Real Retail Sales (adjusted with yesterday's CPI report) and today's release of March Industrial Production.
Official recession calls are the responsibility of the NBER Business Cycle Dating Committee, which is understandably vague about the specific indicators on which they base their decisions. This committee statement is about as close as they get to identifying their method.
There is, however, a general belief that there are four big indicators that the committee weighs heavily in their cycle identification process. They are:
- Industrial Production
- Real Personal Income (excluding transfer payments)
- Nonfarm Employment
- Real Retail Sales (a timelier substitute for Real Manufacturing and Trade Sales)
The Latest Indicator Data
With yesterday's release of CPI data for March, we can now calculate Real Retail Sales. As the adjacent chart shows, this indicator has recovered from its December-January slump and has now hit a record high. The real series was up 0.94% in March and 2.21% year-over-year. As we can see in the YoY chart in the appendix below, the downward trend since early 2011 hit a trough (so far) in January, but the increases in February and March are perhaps signaling a trend reversal. Time will tell.
The latest Industrial Production data includes the Fed's extensive annual revisions published at the end of last month. The March month-over-month increase of 0.7% beat the Investing.com forecast of 0.5%, and the February MoM was revised upward from 0.6% to a whopping 1.2%. The Fed report explains: "The rise in February was higher than previously reported primarily because of stronger gains for durable goods manufacturing and for mining. For the first quarter as a whole, industrial production moved up at an annual rate of 4.4 percent, just slightly slower than in the fourth quarter of 2013."
The chart and table below illustrate the performance of the Big Four with an overlay of a simple average of the four since the end of the Great Recession. The data points show the cumulative percent change from a zero starting point for June 2009. We now have three of the four indicator updates for the 57th month following the recession. With one data point left for March, the Big Four Average (gray line below) is showing the two strongest advances of the past twelve months.
Current Assessment and Outlook
The overall picture of the US economy had been one of a ploddingly slow recovery from the Great Recession, and the data for December and January months documented a sharp contraction contraction. The recovery over the past two months appears to support the general view that severe winter weather was responsible for the contraction, and that we shouldn't read the slippage as the beginnings of a business cycle decline. At this point it looks like the Winter slump has been reversed.
The next update of the Big Four will be the March Personal Income less Transfer Payments, which will be available on May 1st.
Background Analysis: The Big Four Indicators and Recessions
The charts above don't show us the individual behavior of the Big Four leading up to the 2007 recession. To achieve that goal, I've plotted the same data using a "percent off high" technique. In other words, I show successive new highs as zero and the cumulative percent declines of months that aren't new highs. The advantage of this approach is that it helps us visualize declines more clearly and to compare the depth of declines for each indicator and across time (e.g., the short 2001 recession versus the Great Recession). Here is my own four-pack showing the indicators with this technique.
Now let's examine the behavior of these indicators across time. The first chart below graphs the period from 2000 to the present, thereby showing us the behavior of the four indicators before and after the two most recent recessions. Rather than having four separate charts, I've created an overlay to help us evaluate the relative behavior of the indicators at the cycle peaks and troughs. (See my note below on recession boundaries).
The chart above is an excellent starting point for evaluating the relevance of the four indicators in the context of two very different recessions. In both cases, the bounce in Industrial Production matches the NBER trough while Employment and Personal Incomes lagged in their respective reversals.
As for the start of these two 21st century recessions, the indicator declines are less uniform in their behavior. We can see, however, that Employment and Personal Income were laggards in the declines.
Now let's look at the 1972-1985 period, which included three recessions — the savage 16-month Oil Embargo recession of 1973-1975 and the double dip of 1980 and 1981-1982 (6-months and 16-months, respectively).
And finally, for sharp-eyed readers who can don't mind squinting at a lot of data, here's a cluttered chart from 1959 to the present. That is the earliest date for which all four indicators are available. The main lesson of this chart is the diverse patterns and volatility across time for these indicators. For example, retail sales and industrial production are far more volatile than employment and income.
History tells us the brief periods of contraction are not uncommon, as we can see in this big picture since 1959, the same chart as the one above, but showing the average of the four rather than the individual indicators.
The chart clearly illustrates the savagery of the last recession. It was much deeper than the closest contender in this timeframe, the 1973-1975 Oil Embargo recession. While we've yet to set new highs, the trend has collectively been upward, although we have that strange anomaly caused by the late 2012 tax-planning strategy that impacted the Personal Income.
Here is a close-up of the average since 2000.
