by Calculated Risk on 1/24/2016 08:51:00 PM

From James Hamilton at Econbrowser: Can lower oil prices cause a recession?. An excerpt:

There are thus some reasons why a decrease in oil prices would be a boost to the U.S. economy and other reasons why it could even be a drag. A number of studies have looked at the effects of oil price decreases and concluded that these have little or no net positive effect on U.S. real GDP growth; see for example this survey. The price of oil fell from $30/barrel in November 1985 to $12 by July of 1986. U.S. real GDP continued growing throughout, logging a 2.9% increase overall for 1986, neither significantly faster nor slower than normal.

But 1986 was a bad time for Texas and the other oil-producing states. Here’s a graph from some analysis I did with Michael Owyang of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. We estimated for each state’s employment growth a recession-dating algorithm like the one that Econbrowser updates each quarter for the overall U.S. economy (by the way, a new update will be posted this Friday). In the gif [at Econbrowser] you can watch the energy-producing states and their neighbors develop their own regional recession during the mid-1980’s even while national U.S. employment and GDP continued to grow.
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[R]egardless of whether it’s oil prices that are moving stock prices or the other way around, folks in Texas and North Dakota have plenty of reason to be concerned.

Weekend:
• Schedule for Week of January 24, 2016

Monday:
• At 10:30 AM, the Dallas Fed Manufacturing Survey for January.

From CNBC: Pre-Market Data and Bloomberg futures: currently S&P futures are down 3 and DOW futures are down 33 (fair value).

Oil prices were up sharply over the last week with WTI futures at $32.24 per barrel and Brent at $32.33 per barrel.  A year ago, WTI was at $46, and Brent was at $47 - so prices are down about 30% year-over-year.

Here is a graph from Gasbuddy.com for nationwide gasoline prices. Nationally prices are at $1.82 per gallon (down about $0.20 per gallon from a year ago).