Recession Since 2022: US Economic Income and Output Have Fallen Overall for Four Years

In this study we aim to quantify some of the more egregious biases in inflation statistics in order to get us closer to a true understanding of inflation since 2019, hence of true economic growth since 2019.

While 3% may seem like a small difference, in the context of GDP growth it represents nearly a $1 trillion difference in real output - roughly the GDP of Saudi Arabia.

The housing component has had the largest impact in terms of adjusting for the true cost of living; in the second quarter of 2024, it increased the cumulative change in the GDP deflator by roughly 75 percent.

Nominal GDP grew in each quarter of 2019 before contracting in the first half of 2020.

Nominal GDP has consistently expanded through the second quarter of 2024.

Summing the entire period, nominal GDP at a seasonally adjusted annualized rate in the second quarter of 2024 was 37.4 percent higher than the first quarter of 2019.

Utilizing a modified GDP deflator that includes more accurate metrics for housing, regulatory costs, and indirect costs yields a more accurate inflation measurement and therefore a more accurate valuation of real GDP. While the BEA says that from the first quarter of 2019 through the second quarter of 2024 the GDP deflator rose 20.9 percent, the modified GDP deflator has risen 39.9 percent over that same period.

In chained 2017 dollars, adjusted real GDP in the second quarter would be approximately $19,924 billion, about $3,300 billion below the official real GDP figure of $23,224 billion.

Real GDP declined only slightly in the first quarter of 2022, but adjusted real GDP fell sharply, followed by a faster decline in the second quarter.

In the two years from the second quarter of 2022 through the second quarter of 2024, there has been nearly no economic growth according to this adjusted real GDP. On a per capita basis, the results are worse because the population has increased approximately 2.1 percent from the first quarter of 2019 through the second quarter of 2024.

Even without considering population growth and per capita GDP, the adjusted real GDP values imply that the nation entered a recession in the first quarter of 2022 and remained in that contraction through the second quarter of 2024.

In just three of those ten quarters did adjusted real GDP increase and none of the increases occurred in consecutive quarters. 

https://brownstone.org/articles/recession-since-2022-us-economic-income-and-output-have-fallen-overall-for-four-years/