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Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Update on Recession Ending in July 2009

I posed a question on this recent CD post asking why the St. Louis Fed graphs are showing the recession ending in July 2009. Max commented and provided the answer. In the Notes section below each graph you can click on "US recession dates" where it says:

"The NBER has not yet determined the end of the recession that began in December 2007. The date 2009-07-01 has been substituted in graphs as an estimate. This estimate is based on a statistical model for dating business cycle turning points developed by Marcelle Chauvet and Jeremy Piger (A Comparison of the Real-Time Performance of Business Cycle Dating Methods, Journal of Business and Economic Statistics, 2008, 26, 42-49). For more information, see
http://www.uoregon.edu/~jpiger/us_recession_probs.htm."

The graph above shows the Chauvet and Piger recession probabilities back to January 2010 (data here). By July 2009, the recession probability had decreased to 15%, from 77.3% in June 2009, and that huge drop signalled the end of the last recession. Since August of last year, the recession probabilities have been in single-digits and falling, to only 2.8% for January 2010 (most recent month).

My UM-Flint colleague Chris Douglas also points out that the Minneapolis Fed is also using July 2009 as its estimate of the end of the recession.

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