Skip to content

Recession LedgerThe long downturn, dated and checked

Subject

Inflation and jobs

Prices, wages, the labour market, and how each is measured.

The inflation of 2021 to 2023 was the first in forty years, and the pages here were written inside it, month by month, with the data as it arrived. They are kept as they were, including the forecasts that overshot.

The second thread is measurement: what a jobs report is made of, why retail sales in dollars can hide a fall in goods, and why the labour market after 2020 did not mean what it used to.

A dollar bill tucked into a car's open fuel filler

2026

  1. Britain's flat decade: output per hour after 2008

    For ten years British workers produced barely more in an hour than they had in 2007. Part of that, it now turns out, was a mistake in counting the hours.

2022

  1. A recessional for the recession: everyone sings the strong-labour-market tune in unison, and the tune is wrong

    A recessional is the hymn sung while the congregation files out. In 2022 it was sung to make the recession leave the room.

  2. Real GDP says: get real. The second negative quarter of 2022 and the consumer who was never strong

    Consumers spent more money and took home less. That is not resilience. It is inflation measured in the wrong units.

  3. The inflation monster: it is worse than we thought, and it has not grown up yet

    Monetary expansion creates inflation where the money flows. For twelve years it flowed into assets. The question was where it would go when the assets fell.

  4. The relentless march of inflation to the drumbeats of war

    Some of it was the war. Some of it was the response to the war. All of it landed on top of an inflation that was already the highest in forty years.

  5. Federal job fakery hits peak balderdash: the January 2022 payrolls report

    The unemployment rate rose in the same report that showed a hiring boom. Both were true, and neither meant what the headline said.