Is America already in recession?

So recession-watchers have developed rules of thumb. Many now indicate trouble for America. Best-known is the Sahm Rule (see chart 1), which was triggered earlier this month. It looks for a short, sharp rise in unemployment, sounding the alarm when the three-month average of the unemployment rate moves by at least half a percentage point above its 12-month low. A new paper by Pascal Michaillat of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Emmanuel Saez of the University of California, Berkeley, modifies the rule by adding a second indicator: changes in the job-openings rate. This catches every recession since the Depression, and entered the danger zone in March (see chart 2).