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Recession Ledger

An independent record of the downturn that began in 2008 and the years after it. Every forecast here is dated, and checked at the foot of its page.

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.

5 essays, 2022

20225 essays

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

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

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

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

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