{"id":2480,"date":"2007-09-27T13:42:52","date_gmt":"2007-09-27T13:42:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mmm.9dotdigital.ca\/?p=2480"},"modified":"2025-03-27T15:48:32","modified_gmt":"2025-03-27T15:48:32","slug":"us-economic-weakness-still-contained","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mmm.9dotdigital.ca\/?p=2480","title":{"rendered":"US economic weakness still contained"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>As explained in an <a href=\"\/display\/ShowJournal?moduleId=1424374&#038;filterBegin=2007-09-09T00:00:00Z&#038;filterEnd=2007-09-15T23:59:59Z\">earlier post<\/a>, I am sceptical of US recession forecasts. One indicator I am monitoring closely is weekly initial claims for unemployment benefit. Claims always rise sharply at the onset of recessions &ndash; see chart. Indeed they usually start moving ahead of cyclical turning points, which is why they are included as a component of the Conference Board&rsquo;s index of leading indicators. <\/p>\n<p>Claims rose a bit during August but have since fallen back, with the latest figure the lowest since May. A five-week moving average is essentially unchanged from a year ago. Further evidence of labour market resilience comes from daily data on withheld income and employment taxes. Receipts per day so far in September are 7.7% up on a year ago &ndash; slightly above the 6.8% average increase over January-August. <\/p>\n<p>So far so good. <\/p>\n<p><span class=\"full-image-float-none\"><img decoding=\"async\" style=\"width: 500px; height: 286px\" alt=\"us-initial-claims.jpg\" src=\"\/storage\/us-initial-claims.jpg\" \/><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As explained in an earlier post, I am sceptical of US recession forecasts. One indicator I am monitoring closely is weekly initial claims for unemployment benefit. Claims always rise sharply at the onset of recessions &ndash; see chart. Indeed they usually start moving ahead of cyclical turning points, which is why they are included as [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2480","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-money-moves-markets"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmm.9dotdigital.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2480","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmm.9dotdigital.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmm.9dotdigital.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmm.9dotdigital.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmm.9dotdigital.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2480"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mmm.9dotdigital.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2480\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4789,"href":"https:\/\/mmm.9dotdigital.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2480\/revisions\/4789"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmm.9dotdigital.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2480"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmm.9dotdigital.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2480"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmm.9dotdigital.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2480"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}