Status: 07/29/2022 02:34 am
The US economy is shrinking – according to economists, the country is in recession. But Finance Minister Yellen rejected this: She sees “no signs of a typical slowdown”.
By Stephen Root, ARD Studio Washington
The labor market in the USA is booming, private individuals are consuming heavily – despite high inflation: For US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, decisive positive signals are more important than a renewed US GDP decline.
Yellen insisted in Washington that current developments do not tally with his understanding of the economic slowdown. In doing so, she indirectly contradicted the common definition of economists, according to which an economy is in a “technological recession” if economic output falls for two consecutive quarters – as is now the case in the USA.
“Most economists and most Americans define a recession the same way: jobs are lost, mass layoffs, businesses are closing, businesses are slowing, families must survive. That’s not all we have at the moment. We’re looking,” the US Treasury Secretary said.
Inflation is of particular concern
The US Department of Commerce announced yesterday that economic output fell by 0.9 percent from April to June. Economic output also fell in the USA in the first three months of the year.
For people in the United States, however, rapidly rising prices are currently much more important: Inflation is higher than in the euro area, most recently inflation in the USA was 9.1 percent – the highest value since the early 1980s. The most. The mood on the US stock exchanges was mostly good yesterday: the Dow Jones and the S&P 500 each gained more than one percentage point.
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