Commentary
My private theory is that we never really left the recession that began March 2020 with lockdowns. Real household income and labor participation still haven’t recovered. Productivity has crawled along but within the range of statistical error. No question that the U.S. economy has downshifted.
Whatever pathetic growth we experience now barely registers as compared with other periods in the postwar period and is largely wiped out by the sheer chaos of the times.
(Data: Federal Reserve Economic Data [FRED], St. Louis Fed; Chart: Jeffrey A. Tucker)That intuition aside, let’s talk about the data we have. We did have two quarters of falling GDP last year but that decline leveled off. To be sure, these data markers can be sketchy and poorly assembled (government spending contributes to growing the GDP in a technical sense) so we can’t put a great deal of stock in them….