Today’s GDP report seems to have caused traders at Intrade, the online betting/futures market, to rethink their recession bets. Trading there today has pushed odds of a recession down to 30 percent, from 44 percent yesterday. Intrade participants were placing 70 percent…

After writing about some economists who still don’t think we’re in a recession, I thought it would be interesting to revisit the Post-Dispatch R-Word Index. As regular readers will recall, the Economist magazine found a correlation between actual recessions and…

Michael Dueker, a former St. Louis Fed economist now with Russell Investments, has a piece on Econbrowser about his recession-forecasting model. It’s a bit technical for the lay reader, but the bottom line isn’t hard to understand. Dueker writes that ”the model is…

Russ Roberts, the former Washington U. economist who’s now at George Mason University, makes some very good points about why an economic stimulus package won’t work. In an essay for National Public Radio, he starts with some sound logic:

But…

The Economist finds that you could have accurately gauged the last two recessions by counting the number of times the word “recession” appeared in the Washington Post and New York Times. Currently, the magazine says this R-word index is soaring and “sounding alarms,”…

The U.S. Senate’s Joint Economic Committee has scheduled a hearing next Wednesday on ways to stimulate the economy. Among the scheduled witnesses is former Treasury secretary Lawrence Summers, who recently called for a stimulus package of between $50 billion and $75 billion.

Summers…

Illinois was hit hard in the Rust Belt recession of 1980-81 and the dot-com recession of 2001. But the housing recession of 2007, if there is one, should touch the state relatively lightly.

At least, so says University of Illinois economics…

When I talked to economists about last week’s disappointing jobs numbers, I asked them whether the economy is in danger of slipping into recession. Uniformly, the answer was that the chances of a recession have risen but remain low, well under…