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发帖数: 8227 | 8 ECRI 全文：
U.S. Economy Tipping into Recession
Early last week, ECRI notified clients that the U.S. economy is indeed
tipping into a new recession. And there’s nothing that policy makers can do
to head it off.
ECRI’s recession call isn’t based on just one or two leading indexes, but
on dozens of specialized leading indexes, including the U.S. Long Leading
Index, which was the first to turn down – before the Arab Spring and
Japanese earthquake – to be followed by downturns in the Weekly Leading
Index and other shorter-leading indexes. In fact, the most reliable forward-
looking indicators are now collectively behaving as they did on the cusp of
full-blown recessions, not “soft landings.”
Last year, amid the double-dip hysteria, we definitively ruled out an
imminent recession based on leading indexes that began to turn up before QE2
was announced. Today, the key is that cyclical weakness is spreading widely
from economic indicator to indicator in a telltale recessionary fashion.
Why should ECRI’s recession call be heeded? Perhaps because, as The
Economist has noted, we’ve correctly called three recessions without any
false alarms in-between. In contrast, most of those who’ve accurately
predicted a recession or two have also been guilty of crying wolf – in 2010
, 2005, 2003, 1998, 1995, or 1987.
A new recession isn’t simply a statistical event. It’s a vicious cycle
that, once started, must run its course. Under certain circumstances, a drop
in sales, for instance, lowers production, which results in declining
employment and income, which in turn weakens sales further, all the while
spreading like wildfire from industry to industry, region to region, and
indicator to indicator. That’s what a recession is all about.
But how can we have a new recession just a couple of years after the last
one officially ended? Isn’t this too short for an economic expansion?
More than three years ago, before the Lehman debacle, we were already
warning of a longstanding pattern of slowing growth: at least since the
1970s, the pace of U.S. growth – especially in GDP and jobs – has been
stair-stepping down in successive economic expansions. We expected this
pattern to persist in the new economic expansion after the recession ended,
and it certainly did. We also pointed out – months before the recession
ended – that because the “Great Moderation” of business cycles (from
about 1985 to 2007) was now history, the resulting combination of higher
cyclical volatility and lower trend growth would virtually dictate an era of
more frequent recessions.
So it comes as no surprise to us that, with the latest expansion only a
couple of years old, we’re already facing a new recession. Actually, such
short expansions are hardly unheard of. From 1799 to 1929, nearly 90% of U.S
. expansions lasted three years or less, as did two of the three expansions
between 1970 and 1981. In other words, such short expansions are unusual
only with respect to recent decades.
It’s important to understand that recession doesn’t mean a bad economy –
we’ve had that for years now. It means an economy that keeps worsening,
because it’s locked into a vicious cycle. It means that the jobless rate,
already above 9%, will go much higher, and the federal budget deficit,
already above a trillion dollars, will soar.
Here’s what ECRI’s recession call really says: if you think this is a bad
economy, you haven’t seen anything yet. And that has profound implications
for both Main Street and Wall Street. |
