Notwithstanding Fed Chair Yellen’s certainty about her “myths”, recession indicators are continuing to accumulate as the current U.S. economic expansion continues to clearly trend into its twilight period.
While Yellen is apparently not able to “see anything in the underlying strength of the economy that would lead me to be concerned” about recession, let’s take a look at just a few points of interest that she clearly must have missed.
First, there has been notable protracted weakness in industrial production which is now showing a year-over-year decline of over 1%, a VERY strong indicator of fundamental weakness that is virtually always associated either directly with current or looming recession.
Additionally, both Industrial Production and Capacity Utilization have now show simultaneous notable year-over-year declines, an event that is literally associated with every recession since both data sets have been tracked.
Next, jobless claims appear to have hit the low for this expansion which, as we know from all other past expansions, generally does not stay at this level for very long.
In fact, population adjusted Continued Jobless Claims (continued claims as a percentage of non-institutional population) is at the lowest level since 1969, a strong indicator that insurance claims, and by proxy the general employment situation, has reached its best levels of the expansion.
