By Wolf Richter

It says: “Not yet,” and “Quite a ways to go.” This trend has reversed before, but if it doesn’t and instead picks up momentum… Time to keep an eye on it.

By Wolf Richter for WOLF STREET.

When does a recession start? In the US, the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), which calls the official recessions in the US, has always defined recessions as broad economic downturns that include downturns in the labor market, such as declines in employment and significantly rising unemployment, neither of which have happened in this cycle.

My favorite recession indicator is the weekly data on the people who filed for unemployment insurance at least a week earlier and are still claiming unemployment insurance because they still haven’t found a job, what the Labor Department calls “Insured Unemployment.”

The black slanted line is the Recession Marker. The levels that entail a recession have risen over the decades as total employment has risen. This growth of employment over the decades causes the Recession Marker line to be slanted upward.