S&P Global Market Intelligence has put up monthly GDP through December. Here’s a picture of NBER Business Cycle Dating Committee indicators along with monthly GDP.
Figure 1: Nonfarm Payroll incl benchmark revision employment from CES (bold blue), implied NFP from preliminary benchmark through December (blue), civilian employment as reported (orange), industrial production (red), personal income excluding current transfers in Ch.2017$ (bold light green), manufacturing and trade sales in Ch.2017$ (black), consumption in Ch.2017$ (light blue), and monthly GDP in Ch.2017$ (pink), GDP (blue bars), all log normalized to 2021M11=0. Source: BLS via FRED, Federal Reserve, BEA 2024Q4 advance release, S&P Global Market Insights (nee Macroeconomic Advisers, IHS Markit) (2/3/2025 release), and author’s calculations.
The drop in monthly GDP is attributed to net exports and inventories, which SPGMI considers “one-offs”.
Pawel Skrzypczynski brings my attention to research series published by BLS incorporating smoothed population controls. Here’s a comparison of the NFP pre-benchmark revision and December 2024 CPS employment series adjusted to NFP concept, vs NFP post-benchmark revision and CPS employment series adjusted to NFP concept research series adding on the reported January 2025 observation.
Figure 2: NFP December 2024 release (blue), NFP January 2025 post-benchmark revision release (bold dark blue), household survey employment adjusted to NFP concept December 2024 release (tan), household survey employment adjusted to NFP concept incorporating smoothed population controls and reported January 2025 observation (bold dark red), all in thousands, s.a., on log scale. Source: BLS via FRED, BLS1, BLS2.
Notice that the December gap was 4.304 million using the previously reported series, and only 2.041 million using the benchmarked NFP series and the smoothly incorporated population series. In other words, a large portion of the divergence between CES and CPS measures of employment that Heritage’s EJ Antoni has been obsessing about has disappeared.
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