I woke up today to see oil below $27 a barrel, the US 10-year at 1.6% and the Dow down to 15,600. How quickly the economy is faltering. It is a crazy moment.
Oil below $29 a barrel creates Geo-political tensions that can create attacks of aggression. Other countries have already tried to negotiate with the Saudis to raise oil price... and now oil is slipping to even new lows. A tense situation for oil producers.
The US 10-year hitting 1.6% so fast over the past month seems to be building up downward momentum. The yield curve is trying hard to flatten even with short-term rates near zero.
Recession seems imminent. Will it happen?
I called a recession this year based on my assessment of effective demand. Others like Tim Duy and Janet Yellen do not see a recession this year. But they lack an understanding of effective demand.
I have seen this coming for a couple of years.
Back in September of 2013, using my Aggregate Supply- Effective Demand model, I saw that an effective demand limit was forming at a Real GDP around $16 trillion (2009 $$). The AS-ED model was only developed in April, 2013.
Here is an image from a post back then.
I saw that the effective demand lines were bunching together setting up a Long-run Aggregate Supply zone around $16.1 trillion, where the aggregate supply and effective demand lines would meet.
I wrote in September, 2013...
Eventually in a post in August of 2014, I projected...
"The projection now is for real GDP to enter the zone of the effective demand limit between $16.000 trillion and $16.160 trillion. This will happen before 2014 ends assuming the calibration of 0.762 for effective labor share is within a close margin of error."
So what happened?
The red dots show that the crossing points between aggregate supply and effective demand began to rise when Real GDP hit $16.1 trillion. That is a sign of hitting the effective demand limit. This happened before the end of 2014, just as I had predicted. When effective demand rises in the LRAS zone, the dynamics of the economy are on the downside of the business cycle, just starting downward.
Ever since the end of 2014, the economy has been faltering. I predicted that the Dow would orbit 17,300 through 2015. And it did. I gave a 70% chance of recession this year back in January. (link, see comments.)
If this cycle is like the cycle before the 1980 recession, we would see a recession about 2 years after hitting the effective demand limit... That would put a recession this year, 2016, in the summer or fall.
So I got glimpses of the effective demand limit upon Real GDP as early as September, 2013. We have seen this coming for years.
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