According to a piece written by economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco,
"An unstable economic environment has rekindled talk of a double-dip recession. The Conference Board's Leading Economic Index provides data for predicting the probability of a recession but is limited by the weight assigned to its indicators and the varying efficacy of those indicators over different time horizons. Statistical experiments with LEI data can mitigate these limitations and suggest that a recessionary relapse is a significant possibility sometime in the next two years".
http://www.frbsf.org/publications/economics/letter/2010/el2010-24.pdf
Productivity Growth
US productivity growth appears to be easing. A factor behind the low levels of private sector hiring has been the impressive labor productivity growth seen during the past year. While in the long-run high productivity growth is enormously beneficial, it can, however, deter job market growth in post recession recovery periods. Today's data (graphs shown below is from the BLS http://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/prod2.pdf) indicates that for the most recent period productivity growth actually dipped a bit (-0.9%). Will the labor market start improving?
Also, interestingly, unit labor costs have stopped declining. Is the Fed paying attention?
Renowned international trade economist, Jagdish Bhagwati, has an interesting piece in today's Financial Times on America's push to raise the profile of its manufacturing industry.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/54a03eb6-a3eb-11df-9e3a-00144feabdc0.html (requires registration)
US debt load among the worst
http://online.wsj.com/article/federation_feature.html