9 Comments
May 20, 2023Liked by Joseph Politano

Why not "Switched Jobs" than "Quits"? I still feel "Quits" buys into the whole horrible "people too lazy to work" mentality. Here in WV, its the running grumblings from The Employer Class.

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I agree it's a frustrating part of the data communication! Almost all the quits are from people swapping jobs (hence why it's relevant to cyclical labor slack) but since the surveys are from a business perspective they don't distinguish between job switchers, people who return to school, or people who retired. I've heard for pushes to use "voluntary separations," though I feel like that ends up being even more confusing, but yeah.

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May 20, 2023Liked by Joseph Politano

Did not know retired/returned to school was in that mix! But "voluntary separations" is worse.

Living here in WV, I can see and hear how all that sweet wonderful data is used to push the wrong narrative. Thanks !

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Glad for the slow down without a sign of crash, but honestly pretty disappointed that inflation has gone sideways. Might do my part to add to the quits and decrease some consumption soon.

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I wish you would start these with the most important top-level indicator: NGDP (or NGDI) growth. When that normalizes, we'll be out of the woods. Until it does, looking at all the other stuff is just adding color.

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By the old way, and still the most common method throughout the world, of two negative successive quarters, it looks like no recession. Pleased for the USA.

Britain looks like it will escape it too despite the best hopes of the IMF, EU, OECD, etc.

Maybe now it looks likely Biden and his cronies will go back to giving more credence to this old method again. They will usually put an article up on the WH blog a few days ahead of the change of emphasis so that their media and social media pets start to inform the USA public before it happens.

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This definition of recession isn't particularly useful for anything (except maybe tweeting), so there isn't a reason to use it.

If GDP is negative for two quarters but unemployment doesn't increase and wages grow, that doesn't sound like an economic problem. Rather, it probably means we counted GDP wrong.

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I wonder if the Musk twitter definition of recession will be so easy to amend as the last time.

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It's almost like the wage-price theory of inflation is completely wrong, or something.

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