Tracking the Recession

Here are links to perspectives from others on where the economy stands at the moment.

Rising delinquencies. Here’s the assessment from Freddie Mac’s 10-Q (hat tip to Calculated Risk):

We also observed a continued increase in market-reported delinquency rates for mortgages serviced by financial institutions, not only for subprime and Alt-A loans but also for prime loans, and we experienced an increase in delinquency rates for all product types during the first quarter of 2009. This delinquency data suggests that continuing home price declines and growing unemployment are significantly affecting behavior by a broader segment of mortgage borrowers…. Our loan loss severities, or the average amount of recognized losses per loan, also continued to increase in the first quarter of 2009, especially in the states of California, Florida, Nevada and Arizona, where home price declines have been more severe and where we have significant concentrations of mortgage loans with higher average loan balances than in other states.

ADS index. The Philadelphia Federal Reserve has added some features to its website for the Aruoba-Diebold-Scotti Business Conditions Index (the background for which I described here) which make it a bit more accessible. The index currently stands at -2.02. I’d want to see it rise above -1.0 before describing the upward trajectory since January as signaling a clear improvement. For readers’ convenience I’ve also included a thumbnail of the latest graph of the ADS index on our main page. The figure below should be a live link to the latest values any time you reload this page:

Aruoba-Diebold-Scotti Business Conditions Index

Tim Duy’s not optimistic. Here’s what the always insightful Tim Duy thinks about prospects for recovery:

I suspect we have a long path ahead of us on the structural challenge poised by overleveraged households– suggesting that the green shoots we hear so much about will yield little more than stunted growth.

Music to central bank by. And via Greg Mankiw, check out Merle Hazard and Bretton Wood singing “Inflation or Deflation”:

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Stanford Professor John Taylor plays straight man for the act here.

Tracking the recession

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