None of four US recession gauges flashed an alarm as of Nov. 13, according to figures from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis and the US Labor Department.
The Treasury yield spread remained positive, and the Sahm rule stayed below its recession signal threshold. Unemployment and initial jobless claims matched their respective one-year lows, although no alarm thresholds were specified for those two measures.
The 10-year minus 2-year Treasury spread stood at positive 0.27 percentage point in the St. Louis Fed's FRED data. That put the spread above zero, the dividing line between a positive spread and an inverted yield curve, meaning the longer-term Treasury yields less than the shorter-term Treasury.
The spread measures the difference between the yields on Treasury securities with those two maturities. At the reference date, the 10-year yield exceeded the 2-year yield by 27 basis points, or 0.27 percentage point.
The curve had spent zero days inverted over the preceding two years. Its current reading and the two-year inversion count both carried a green designation in the supplied assessment.
The Sahm rule stood at 0.00 in the central bank's data, below the recession signal threshold of a reading above 0.5 percentage point, according to the supplied assessment. A reading exactly at 0.5 would not exceed that threshold.
The rule compares average unemployment over three months with its lowest three-month average in the past year. Readings above 0.5 have historically coincided with the start of a recession.
The unemployment rate was 4.1%, the Labor Department's figures showed. It was zero percentage points above its one-year low, putting the current rate at that low rather than showing an increase from it.
The four-week average of initial jobless claims was 195,000 in the department's figures. The average was zero percent above its one-year low, so that measure also matched its lowest level over the comparison period.
Both labor-market measures carried green designations. Their comparisons with one-year lows describe where they stand relative to recent readings, but neither comparison came with a numerical threshold for a recession alarm.
The zero-out-of-four assessment therefore includes two gauges with explicit dividing lines and two assessed against their one-year lows. The yield spread was on the positive side of zero, while the Sahm reading was below its trigger.
All four gauges were classified as green on the reference date. Those classifications describe the readings as of Nov. 13 and do not establish whether a recession will occur.
