Page 11 - NBIZ October 2022

Duration Drop in Job Losses Unemp Bank of America, citing a hot labor market, improv-
Dates Peak ing retail sales, and underlying momentum in GDP, has
(months) GDP (%) (millions)
(%)
postponed when it believes a recession will start from late
Jan ’80 - Jul ’80 6 2.2 1.154 7.8 this year to sometime next year.
Jul ’81 – Nov ’82 16 2.6 2.684 10.8 Goldman Sachs believes the U.S. may avoid a recession
Jul ’90 – Mar ’91 8 1.4 1.560 7.8 entirely because inflation has begun to moderate, job
Mar ’01 – Nov ’01 8 0.4 2.560 6.3 growth remains strong, and declines in spending and
income have begun to taper off.
Dec ’07 – Jun ’09 18 4.0 8.705 10.0 A point of note: The normal state of the U.S. economy
Feb ’20 – Apr ’20 2 10.1 21.991 14.7 is expansion, not contraction. Since January 1980, it has
Sources: National Bureau for Economic Research, U.S. Bureau been in growth mode for 512 months and in contraction
of Economic Analysis, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, and for only 58 months.
Partnership calculations
If the U.S. slips into a recession, will Houston follow?
What do the big investment banks think? Likely yes, but not certainly. Houston’s economy
UBS believes the odds of a U.S. recession have surged is growing faster than that of the nation and may
to sixty percent when accounting for Treasury bill yields, have enough momentum so that any losses would
credit data, and broad macro indicators. be minimal.
JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon believes the The downturn associated with 9/11 and Enron
chances of a "soft landing" to be ten percent, of "mild (’01-’03) saw employment erode over two years, and the
recession" to be twenty to thirty percent, a “harder reces- region lost 31,500 jobs peak to trough, or 1.4 percent
sion” at twenty to thirty per cent, and "something worse" of total em ploy ment. Once the recovery began, Houston
at twenty to thirty percent. recouped the job losses in 15 months.

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