White Swan Flying

Merrill Lynch Is taking about the positive impact of warm weather on the economy.

Merrill Lynch: Plugging in the December temperature and snowfall data to the output of the model from Bloesch and Gouri, we find that the weather can explain about 97,000 of job growth. This would imply that without the weather distortion, the economy would have added 195,000 jobs. While we don’t want to give a false sense of precision, this seems like a reasonable approximation. Before the sharp acceleration the past three months, job growth was trending at around 200,000 a month.

And with unemployment flat for December I doubt the recession committee can give us our blue bar in Q4.  So the regularly scheduled recession has been moved up to Q1/Q2.