The minutes of the April meeting of the Federal Reserve’s Federal Open Markets Committee (FOMC) were released yesterday. They reflected the Fed’s view that the economy would continue to weaken and contained amended projections of much higher inflation as well as slower growth.
All of the Fed’s weaker economic projections stopped just short of declaring that we are in or are headed into a recession. But the dubious use of core Consumer Price Index (CPI) inflation measures that exclude food and energy as opposed to the broader measure as the deflator in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) calculations is the difference between whether we are technically in a recession or not. So I guess those of us who do not eat or use energy are not in recession, the rest of us are.
