by Eric Boehm at Reason
A bummer of a jobs report released Friday morning triggered a sharp drop in the stock market and stoked fear of a coming recession—thanks to something known as the “Sahm Rule.”
So what is that?
It is named after economist Claudia Sahm, who served as a top economic advisor during the Obama administration and identified a historical indicator of coming recessions in 2019: every time since 1970 that the three-month moving average of the U.S. unemployment rate is more than half a percentage point above the lowest three-month moving average from the previous year, a recession has soon followed.
That’s a bit complicated, admittedly. If you want to know what it looks like in practice, check out today’s jobs report. Unemployment in July ticked upwards to 4.3 percent. Over the past three months, the average unemployment rate has been 4.13 percent. That’s quite a bit higher than the lowest three-month average from the past year—which was 3.63 percent, between June and August 2023.
Thus, the Sahm Rule has been triggered.
But the “rule” is also a set of guidelines. In the 2019 paper where Sahm identified…
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