Political Calculations
Unexpectedly Intriguing!
09 December 2025
An editorial cartoon of a Federal Reserve official looking into a crystal ball that says 'RECESSION? ASK AGAIN LATER'. Image generated by Microsoft Copilot Designer

The probability that the National Bureau of Economic Research will someday determine a national recession began in the U.S. between December 2025 and December 2026 has fallen below twenty percent.

That is the lowest probability returned by a recession forecasting method that we've been following since December 2022, which we started tracking after the U.S. Treasury yield curve inverted in October 2022. This method was developed by Jonathan Wright while working for the Federal Reserve Board back in 2006. It incorporates the one-quarter averages of the spread between the 10-Year and 3-Month constant maturity U.S. Treasuries and the level of the Federal Funds Rate to anticipate, within a 12-month period from an observation date, what the probability the U.S. economy will be in a period of contraction according to criteria used by the NBER.

The reason we're following it is because it often takes the NBER months to get around to making that determination after a recession has started. And since a yield curve inversion, when the yield of a 3-Month Treasury is higher than the yield of 10-Year Treasury, is often a harbinger of recession, using a recession forecasting method built using historic data that incorporates it can be useful.

The current recession probability level has been achieved following the two reductions in the Federal Funds Rate the Fed has made in the last three months. These cuts have lowered this base interest rate to a target range of 3.75-4.00%. Investors expect the Fed will act again on Wednesday, 10 December 2025 to lower it by another quarter percent to a target range of 3.50-3.75%, the lowest it has been since October 2022.

The following update to the Recession Probability Track shows how the probability of recession has evolved from 20 January 2021 through 8 December 2025 in the context of how the difference between the yields of the 10-year and 3-month U.S. Treasuries combined with the level of the Federal Funds Rate have changed over this time.

Recession Probability, 20 January 2021 through 8 December 2025

Because Wright's method looks to see whether any of the next twelve months into the future will contain a month the NBER will determine marks the peak of a business cycle, or rather Month 0 of a period of economic contraction, having the latest recession probability falling below the 20% threshold doesn't mean the U.S. economy is out of the woods. We've summarized what periods Wright's method has indicated since we've been tracking it for this series is most likely to include that Month 0:

50% Probability of Recession

  • 13 February 2023 through 29 November 2025

60% Probability of Recession

  • 25 April 2023 through 29 October 2025

70% Probability of Recession

  • 25 May 2023 through 8 October 2024
  • 31 January 2024 through 29 March 2025
  • 5 September 2024 through 20 September 2025

These are the periods the recession forecasting method predicts the National Bureau of Economic Research will someday identify as containing the month in which a period of economic contraction began. The three sets of dates that apply for a 70% or greater probability of recession relate to a "triple-top" series of peaks the model has recorded since mid-2023.

The end of the first period at this greatly elevated recession probability coincides with when the U.S. Federal Reserve initiated a new series of interest rate cuts that took place between September and December 2024 to forestall a recession from starting in the U.S. during the 2024 election season.

The first two periods coincide with a period of anemic job growth in the U.S. economy, which is confirmed by Bureau of Labor Statistics data that has undergone two massive downward revisions, confirming the labor market was far weaker than initially reported.

The third period coincides with the timing for when the Federal Reserve resumed cutting U.S. interest rates to address a slowing economy in September 2025.

The most important thing to take away from this retrospective analysis is that the recession model's forecasts for these elevated recession probabilities were set more than a year ago. Today's economic weakness has been baked in for a very long time.

Analyst's Notes

This is the end of the road for our series! Both our criteria for terminating the series have now been met: the U.S. Treasury yield curve has not been inverted since September 2025 and the recession probability threshold finally dropped below 20% this month. If you still want to follow recession probability estimates, there are alternate estimates based on different methods that will give you a current estimate.

The recession probability we've presented is based on the Federal Reserve Board's yield curve-based recession forecasting model, which factors in the one-quarter average spread between the 10-year and 3-month constant maturity U.S. Treasuries and the corresponding one-quarter average level of the Federal Funds Rate. If you'd like to do that math using the latest data available to anticipate where the Recession Probability Track is heading, we have provided a tool to make it easy to do.

For the latest updates of the U.S. Recession Probability Track, follow this link!

Previously on Political Calculations

We started this new recession watch series on 18 October 2022, coinciding with the inversion of the 10-Year and 3-Month constant maturity U.S. Treasuries. Here are all the posts-to-date on that topic in reverse chronological order, including this one....

Image Credit: Microsoft Copilot Designer. Prompt: "An editorial cartoon of a Federal Reserve official looking into a crystal ball that says 'RECESSION? ASK AGAIN LATER'".

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08 December 2025
An editorial cartoon of a Wall Street bull and a bear watching a stage show featuring a Federal Reserve official who is announcing a rate cut. Image generated with Microsoft Copilot Designer.

The S&P 500 (Index: SPX) closed out the first week of December 2025 at 6,870.40, up 0.3% from where it closed the previous week.

The main focus of investors continues to be what action the Federal Reserve will take with short term U.S. interest rates. After putting on a show in recent weeks to try to convince markets that it might not continue reducing the Federal Funds Rate at the end of its next rate-setting meeting on Wednesday, 10 December 2025, evidence of continued anemic growth in the U.S. labor market announced during the past week is leading investors to expect the Fed will cut rates.

The CME Group's FedWatch Tool captures that sentiment. It held steady in the past week, indicating an 87% probability of a quarter point rate cut on 10 December (2025-Q4). Looking beyond the end of 2025, the FedWatch tool gives better than even odds for additional quarter point rate cuts on 29 April (2026-Q2) and 29 July (2026-Q3). A third rate cut anticipated for 9 December (2026-Q4) a week ago is no longer in the outlook, with the next potential rate cut pushed out into 2027.

Even though the probability of a rate cut is high, the Fed's minions arguing against a rate cut have succeeded in creating enough doubt that investors remain focused on the current quarter of 2025-Q4 in setting current day stock prices. The latest update of the alternative futures chart shows the trajectory of the S&P 500 falls in the middle of the redzone forecast range we added two weeks earlier, assuming investors would be focused on 2025-Q4 going into this upcoming trading week.

Alternative Futures - S&P 500 - 2025Q4 - Standard Model (m=-2.0 from 28 Apr 2025) - Snapshot on 5 Dec 2025

After the Fed meets, there will be little reason for investors to continue placing much attention on 2025-Q4. We think investors will quickly shift their forward-looking attention toward the slightly more distant quarter of 2026-Q1, since it will become the focus of timing for the next rate change actions by the Fed.

Whether that plays out as we think will depend on the random onset of new information. Speaking of which, here are the market-moving headlines that influenced investor expectations during the past week.

Monday, 1 December 2025
Tuesday, 2 December 2025
Wednesday, 3 December 2025
Thursday, 4 December 2025
Friday, 5 December 2025

We're rapidly coming up on another period in which we'll need to add another redzone forecast range to the chart to track the most likely trajectory the S&P 500 will be taking in the weeks ahead. Unlike the current redzone forecast range that is set to end early in this upcoming week, we anticipate the actual trajectory of the S&P 500 will overshoot the projections of the dividend futures-based model for several weeks going into 2026. This is a consequence of the model's use of historic stock prices as the base reference points for making its projections of the S&P 500's future, in which the echoes of past volatility affect the model's forecasts. The redzone forecasts we add get around that inconvenience by bridging across the period in which those echoes affect the model's raw projections.

The Atlanta Fed's GDPNow tool projection of real GDP growth in the U.S. during the recently ended 2025-Q3 ticked down from +3.9% last week to +3.5% week. The tool won't shift to forecast 2025-Q4's GDP until 23 December 2025. The BEA's official initial estimate of GDP for 2025-Q3 will be released on that date.

Image credit: Microsoft Copilot Designer. Prompt: "An editorial cartoon of a Wall Street bull and a bear watching a stage show featuring a Federal Reserve official who is announcing a rate cut"

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05 December 2025
Big Data by Learntek on Flickr - https://www.flickr.com/photos/153724200@N07/27774351928/

According to Revelio Labs' public labor statistics data, seasonally adjusted total nonfarm employment in the U.S. fell by in November 2025. The firm's estimate of nonfarm employment is 159,231,610 for the month, down about 9,000 from its revised estimate of 159,240,592 for October 2025. Compared to November 2024 however, the estimate for November 2025 is up nearly 208,000.

Revelio Labs' data indicates total nonfarm employment peaked in April 2025 at 159,280,995 and has largely been slightly lower to flat in the period since. November 2025's estimate is within 0.03% of that peak.

Meanwhile, the BLS has released employment data through September 2025, putting its initial estimate of seasonally adjusted total nonfarm employment at 159,626,000 for the month, which represents a peak in its data series. This value is up 119,000 from the BLS' revised estimate of 159,507,000 for August 2025 and is almost 370,000 higher than Revelio Labs' estimate for September 2025.

Before we go any further, Revelio Labs' appears to have executed a major revision of its historical data, with large negative changes to its oldest data that tapers off to very small downward changes for the most recent months. The following chart captures both the BLS' and Revelio Lab's latest estimates of seasonally adjusted total nonfarm employment over the period from January 2022 through November 2025 and all Revelio Labs' estimates released in October, November, and December 2025.

U.S. Total Nonfarm Employment (Seasonally Adjusted), January 2022 - November 2025

Analyst's Notes

At this writing, Revelio Labs' has not produced any statement to account for its large downward revisions in its oldest data, which are substantial. In our featured chart, the firm's November 2025 estimate for January 2022 was reduced by over 1.6 million from its October 2025 estimate. Even so, the firm's estimate for January 2022 is over 1.9 million higher than the BLS' estimate for the month.

Without an explanation, we caution against using Revelio Labs' historical data in other analyses. We do observe that Revelio Labs' data does generally match the direction of employment changes in the BLS' historical series over the period covered in our chart, so its still likely useful for divining that aspect of how the total nonfarm employment level is changing over time.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics indicates it will next release its employment situation data on Tuesday, 16 December 2025, which will include newly released estimates for both October and November 2025.

References

Revelio Labs. Total Nonfarm Employment National. [CSV Data]. 4 December 2025.

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Total Nonfarm Employment. Current Employment Statistics - CES. [Online database]. Last Updated 20 November 2025.

Image credit: Big Data by Learntek on Flickr. Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Deed. Public Domain.

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04 December 2025

The dividend futures-based model we invented to project the potential future trajectories the S&P 500 (Index: SPX) starts from a very simple observation:

Ap = m * Ad

In this relationship, Ap represents the change in the rate of growth of stock prices and Ad is the change in the rate of growth of dividends per share. The value m is an amplification factor that varies over long periods of time but can be nearly constant for short-to-intermediate periods of time.

Since we first formulated this relationship in April 2009, we've found that short-to-intermediate periods of time can be as long as decades. But eventually, the value of m does change and whenever it does it's a big deal because it means the market regime in which stock prices are set has changed.

The following chart tracks how the value of m has changed from January 2014 through the end of November 2025, which covers the period after we first developed the alternative futures chart we use to visualize the dividend-based model's projections. Our initial observations that set the value of m = 5.0 however go back to March 2010, when dividend futures as we know them today became a reality and made that estimation possible. We should also note that m was almost certainly at that same level for years before that point in time.

S&P 500 Market Regimes, 2 January 2024 - 28 November 2025

So what is m really?

A potential solution to that mystery was advanced by Xavier Gabaix and Ralph S.J. Koijen in their June 2021 working paper In Search of the Origins of Financial Fluctuations: The Inelastic Market Hypothesis. For us, this paper immediate leapt to the front of the pack for its potential explanatory power of what m represents because of a simple example they developed to explore one of their propositions. Here is a screenshot of the proposition:

Gabaix/Koijen: Inelastic Market Hypothesis Proposition 3

Here is their example:

To think through the economics of Proposition 3, we found the following simple, undergraduate-level example useful. Suppose that there are just two funds: the pure bond fund and the representative mixed fund, which always holds 80% in equities (the magnitude suggested by Figure 1). Then, theta = .08, kappa = 0, so that zeta = 1 - zeta = 0.2 and and 1/zeta = 5. Then an extra 1% inflow into the stock market increases the total market valuation by 5%.

Or to put it more simply, a multiplier of 5 for this simple example, which puts it in the right ballpark for our observations.

It certainly is an intriguing possibility, especially if it can explain for how the value of m has changed in the period since 19 February 2020, during which the value of m has held at various constant levels for much shorter periods of time.

References

Xavier Gabaix and Ralph S.J. Koijen. In Search of the Origins of Financial Fluctuations: The Inelastic Markets Hypothesis. National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper 28967. [PDF Document]. June 2021.

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03 December 2025
Multicolored soap bubble image by Alexa from Pixabay - https://pixabay.com/photos/soap-bubble-multicoloured-bullet-824927/

A little over three years ago, Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology took off in the public consciousness with OpenAI's public release of ChatGPT.

That event took place in a period of relative chaos for the U.S. stock market. That period of chaos started with the S&P 500's plunge after February 2020 with the arrival of 2020's coronavirus pandemic in the U.S., which ended the period of relative order that had established itself in December 2018. The inflation phase of the bubble began after March 2020 with the passage of COVID stimulus funds, which initiated the inflation of the COVID/Biden Stimulus Bubble.

The deflation phase of that bubble began after it peaked in December 2021 and by June 2022, the level of the S&P 500 had returned to levels consistent with where stock prices would have been had the relative order that had been in place starting in December 2018 had simply continued. The following chart, which tracks the average monthly value of the S&P 500 against its underlying trailing year dividends per share shows the scale of that event in the context of the relative periods of order and chaos we've documented since December 1991.

S&P 500 Average Monthly Index Value vs Trailing Year Dividends per Share, Logarithmic Scale, December 1991-June 2022 (through 22 June 2022)

Stock prices continued falling through September 2022 before starting to re-establish some semblance of relative order in the latter part of that year when stock prices began to recover. ChatGPT was rolled out in that environment on 30 November 2022, which helped contribute to the stock market's initial recovery phase that ran through late July 2023, then reversed through late October 2023. It wasn't until 29 December 2023 that what we define as the current period of relative order established itself.

From here, we can track the progress of the current period of relative order in the U.S. stock market on a more refined chart. Here is what that period of order looks like from 29 December 2023 through 2 December 2025:

S&P 500 Index Value vs Trailing Year Dividends per Share, 29 December 2023 through 2 December 2025

This chart allows us to quantify what most analysts might identify as the AI bubble, but which we do not because of how we define what a bubble is. Here is our working definition:

An economic bubble exists whenever the price of an asset that may be freely exchanged in a well-established market first soars then plummets over a sustained period of time at rates that are decoupled from the rate of growth of the income that might be realized from owning or holding the asset.

Going back to our chart of the current period of relative order, we find it captures the inflation and deflation phase of the so-called "AI Bubble" that has occurred within it. The inflation phase runs from 29 December 2023 and continues until it peaks in 19 February 2025, just ahead of a market-shaking event for AI stocks. That event came in the form of China's Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence Basic Technology Research company's Friday, 21 February 2025 statement that they would release an open source version of their advanced AI system in the following week, which they followed through and did on Monday, 24 February 2025.

This event popped the proverbial AI bubble. Stock prices plunged until they started to stabilize in late March 2025, but by then, what passed for the AI bubble had all but fully deflated.

Shortly afterward, President Trump's 2 April 2025 "Liberation Day" global tariff announcement sent the S&P 500 plunging much lower, threatening to break the market's current relative period of order. It didn't because less than a week later, President Trump announced a 90-day suspension of the higher tariffs would seek to impose, which prompted a rapid recovery in stock prices that prevented order from fully breaking down.

However, it's not until late June 2025, after Nvidia (NYSE: NVDA) announced blockbuster earnings of its AI-chip systems that we see signs the AI-bubble may have begun a new inflation phase.

From our perspective, the so-called AI bubble doesn't yet deserve that designation. Although it has contributed to making the current relative period of order somewhat chaotic, stock prices remain within the range we identify has established itself during this period, for which we can used the tools of statistical analysis to quantify. The first inflation-deflation phase of the AI-bubble would at best cover 2.5 standard deviations of the variation of stock prices recorded between 29 December 2023 and 2 December 2025, or about 612 points. What passes as its new inflation phase, which we track from 20 June 2025 to the present, is similar in magnitude and is equivalent to about 9% of the current value of the S&P 500.

What would it take for us to officially recognize the AI Bubble as an actual bubble? We would need to see the 20-day moving average of the S&P 500 rise above the upper red dashed line indicated on our refined chart and stay there. For the upcoming milestone of the S&P 500's trailing year dividends reaching $79 per share, that would mean the index sustaining a level above $7,000 for at least 20 trading days to even begin to qualify. Which is to say the earliest that might happen would be early in 2026.

Celebrating Political Calculations' Anniversary

We hope you've enjoyed this analysis because we're celebrating our anniversary a little early this year! Our anniversary posts typically represent the biggest ideas and celebration of the original work we develop here each year, where we've only missed 2024 because we were tied up with other projects. Here are our landmark posts from previous years:

  • A Year's Worth of Tools (2005) - we celebrated our first anniversary by listing all the tools we created in our first year. There were just 48 back then. Today, there are over 300....
  • The S&P 500 At Your Fingertips (2006) - the most popular tool we've ever created, allowing users to calculate the rate of return for investments in the S&P 500, both with and without the effects of inflation, and with and without the reinvestment of dividends, between any two months since January 1871.
  • The Sun, In the Center (2007) - we identify the primary driver of stock prices and describe a whole new way to visualize where they're going (especially in periods of order!)
  • Acceleration, Amplification and Shifting Time (2008) - we apply elements of chaos theory to describe and predict how stock prices will change, even in periods of disorder.
  • The Trigger Point for Taxes (2009) - we work out both when, and by how much, U.S. politicians are likely to change the top U.S. income tax rate. Sadly, events in recent years have proven us right.
  • The Zero Deficit Line (2010) - a whole new way to find out how much federal government spending Americans can really afford and how much Americans cannot really afford!
  • Can Increasing the Minimum Wage Boost GDP? (2011) - using data for teens and young adults spanning 1994 and 2010, not only do we demonstrate that increasing the minimum wage fails to increase GDP, we demonstrate that it reduces employment and increases income inequality as well!
  • The Discovery of the Unseen (2012) - we go where so-called experts on income inequality fear to tread and reveal that U.S. household income inequality has increased over time mostly because more Americans live alone!

We marked our 2013 anniversary in three parts, since we were telling a story too big to be told in a single blog post! Here they are:

  • The Major Trends in U.S. Income Inequality Since 1947 (2013, Part 1) - we revisit the U.S. Census Bureau's income inequality data for American individuals, families and households to see what it really tells us.
  • The Widows Peak (2013, Part 2) - we identify when the dramatic increase in the number of Americans living alone really occurred and identify which Americans found themselves in that situation.
  • The Men Who Weren't There (2013, Part 3) - our final anniversary post installment explores the lasting impact of the men who died in the service of their country in World War 2 and the hole in society that they left behind, which was felt decades later as the dramatic increase in income inequality for U.S. families and households.

Resuming our list of anniversary posts....

Image credit: Multicolored soap bubble image by Alexa from Pixabay.

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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

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