EJ Antoni — Who Believes We’ve Been in Recession since 2022 — Worries that Democrats Will Misunderstand GDPNow to Claim We’re Entering a Recession in 2025Q1

Antoni writes:

Remember when GDP contracted under Biden but Dems said that wasn’t a recession? What will they say now that Trump is president? ATL Fed’s GDP nowcast for Q1 just plunged from 2.3% to -1.5% as everyone begins to realize our “growth” has just been debt-fueled gov’t spending

Well, I don’t recall many mainstream economists declaring a recession. I certainly didn’t, for two reasons. First, as any sentient economist knows, recessions are not declared by the NBER’s Business Cycle Dating Committee solely on the basis of two consecutive quarters of GDP growth, but rather personal income ex-transfers, employment and other indicators. Second, most macroeconomists were aware (unlike Dr. Antoni) of the anomalous gold imports driving the negative GDP growth nowcast — here’s my 3/3 commentary. My assessment from 3/4:

Figure 1: GDP as reported 2nd release (bold black), February median SPF (light blue line), NY Fed (2/28) (blue square), GS (3/3) (green inverted triangle), GDPNow (3/3) (red triangle), and GDPNow adjusted to omit import effect of 2/28 (pink square), all in bn.Ch.2017$, SAAR. Source: BEA 2nd release, NY Fed, Atlanta Fed, Philadelphia Fed, Goldman Sachs, and author’s calculations.

I must confess some confusion as to Dr. Antoni’s beliefs. As argued in this paper with Peter St. Onge, the US economy has been in recession since 2022. Recall this graph?

Source: Antoni and St. Onge (2024).

As far as I know, Dr. Antoni never declared the end to the recession which allegedly began in 2022. Hence, he should be happy to acknowledge the indication of recession in 2025Q1 as vindication.

As an aside, Dr. Antoni has never responded to any queries regarding the construction of the deflator that yields the green line in the figure above (I can’t replicate it — see here).