A Conjectured Sahm Index for November [corrected]

The November unemployment rate came in at 4.6% v. 4.5% Bloomberg consensus. What does the Sahm rule say about whether we’re in a recession or not? Nothing, as we don’t have an October reading (thanks to the wisdom of OMB declaring BLS employees non-essential).

But suppose we linearly interpolated September and November unemployment rates, so October is assumed to be 4.5%. Then the 3 month trailing average of the unemployment rate (4.5%) is 0.5 0.43 above the minimum 3 month moving average unemployment rate (4% 4.07%) over the preceding 12 months. [Thanks to Pawel Skrzypczynski for catching my mistake!]

Figure 1 [CORRECTED]: Sahm indicator (blue). November observation assumes October unemployment rate is 4.5%. Source: BLS, and author’s calculations.

A cautionary note: the Sahm realtime indicator also breached the threshold in August-September 2024. On the other hand, Michaillat-Saez argue for a recession since March 2024.