Thursday, March 19, 2020

Fed projects 2% chance of recession

The ever vigilant Fed has their chart of recession chances, updated March 2, pegged at 2%. From the FRED web site, "Smoothed recession probabilities for the United States are obtained from a dynamic-factor markov-switching model applied to four monthly coincident variables: non-farm payroll employment, the index of industrial production, real personal income excluding transfer payments, and real manufacturing and trade sales." Now, a lot has happened since March 2, including a widespread epidemic of SARS-CoV-2, although the first case was detected back in January. The Fed has initiated dozens of rescue vehicles and two emergency rate cuts to set short term rates back to 0%. If you argue that the chart is not up to date, then why only update it once a month when clearly conditions can go from 52 week highs to 52 week lows in less than that time? In other words, why publish a useless, untimely chart? Maybe so they can update it after the fact to show this model was somehow predictive. Fail.

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