Modern American Patriots!

This video of citizens in action is downright INSPIRING!http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUpQ_EJMdGs

Local Minima in the CIVPART-EMRATIO Spread (with thanks to the St Louis Fed -I like FRED!)

Here is another look at yet more data suggesting that we are indeed entering a recession - just in case the most recent new claims report has you questioning whether that is the case or no - I welcome speculation on the explanatory side of this...

I got to fiddling around with data series from FRED, the St Louis Fed online data source and got curious about the spread between the CIVPART series, which is the labor participation rate, and the EMRATIO series, which is the employed as a percent of the population. I eyeballed the recession bands and layered them in, I need to learn how my infoporn hero CR does his recession bands... in any case, it seems whenever this spread is coming off of a local minima we are going into a recession, period. How much and how long... quien sabe?

One more unnecessary recession indicator post

Well today we had the third job loss month in a row, with some material revisions to the previous two months numbers - downward - which got me curious about the FRED plots from the St Louis Fed...

Here is the USPRIV, which is from the same source and plots the total of all private sector employees % change year over year:


Here is the UNEMPLOY series plot of the % change over year ago - we have just breached a level that appears to be associated with recessions when coming from a bottom in the unemployment rate - there is one time we reached it back in the late '60s without a breach that did not result in a recession...take a look and draw your own conclusions.

Seems to me the question now, as so many others have also posed is which mix of short/long and shallow/deep are we going to have with this recession? Talk amongst yourselves.