Unexpectedly Intriguing!
12 October 2012

Looking at the just published trade data between the U.S. and China, it would appear that both the U.S. and China have fallen into recession. Both nations are now showing near-zero annualized growth rates for the value of goods and services traded between them in August 2012:

Annualized Growth Rates of US-China Trade, January 1985 through August 2012

That's a change from what we observed back in August, when it appears that China's economy had rebounded somewhat from a slow spring, based on the data then that only covered the period through June 2012.

Since then, the annualized growth rate of U.S. exports to China has fallen back to the low single digits that are consistent with that nation's economy being in recession. Going by international trade data, China entered into recession back in December 2011.

Meanwhile, the year-over-year growth rate of U.S. imports from China has turned negative for the first time since November 2009, when the U.S. was still coming out of recession.

So far, that's consistent with our earlier observation that the U.S. economy was in a microrecession in the second quarter of 2012, as the trade data collected and reported by the U.S. Census tends to lag the actual state of the economy by a number of months. The growth rate of the U.S. imports from China had last been negative in the period from November 2008 through November 2009, although officially, the previous recession in the U.S. ran from December 2007 through June 2009, with fairly mild recessionary conditions prevailing through the first half of 2008.

Labels: ,

About Political Calculations

Welcome to the blogosphere's toolchest! Here, unlike other blogs dedicated to analyzing current events, we create easy-to-use, simple tools to do the math related to them so you can get in on the action too! If you would like to learn more about these tools, or if you would like to contribute ideas to develop for this blog, please e-mail us at:

ironman at politicalcalculations

Thanks in advance!

Recent Posts

Indices, Futures, and Bonds

Closing values for previous trading day.

Most Popular Posts
Quick Index

Site Data

This site is primarily powered by:

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?

CSS Validation

Valid CSS!

RSS Site Feed

AddThis Feed Button

JavaScript

The tools on this site are built using JavaScript. If you would like to learn more, one of the best free resources on the web is available at W3Schools.com.

Other Cool Resources

Blog Roll

Market Links

Useful Election Data
Charities We Support
Shopping Guides
Recommended Reading
Recently Shopped

Seeking Alpha Certified

Archives