I have been asking myself where are we now globally on this economy cycle (confusing with conflicting data here and there). Did some charting last week, sharing some here.



On this annual GDP chart, it looks like the USA has gotten itself out of the recession. BUT using the recession definition, it is 2 consecutive quarters with negative GDP. See plot below.



* In the annual USA GDP, it was positive in 2011 but quarterly 2011 GDP showed 2 quarters with negative GDP. So some hidden signal when one looks at the annual GDP.
* 2012 Q4 and 2013 Q1 negative GDP for the USA. 2013 Q2 positive. My lay-person's view is, too early to say the recession is behind them now.

In 2009 recession, about 43% of the countries had negative GDP. Not too bad in my view as 57% of the countries had positive GDP. But not all the countries are the same, e.g. USA is about 50 times bigger than Malaysia in GDP term. So for GDP weighted comparison, 77% of the global GDP were negative in 2009. Now that is scary.

One surprising thing for me is China.



Its last recession was 37 years ago in 1976! So time for correction there with a coming recession? Don't have quarterly GDP for China to check.

Cheerio.

This post has been edited by plumberly: Aug 18 2013, 11:14 AM