A lot can happen over the course of a week when it comes to the crowd’s fickle sentiment du jour on matters of recession. At this time a week ago the headlines warned that a contraction, if it hadn’t already started, was imminent. Fast forward a week and you can hear a collective sigh of relief in the wake of economic news in recent days. In fact, the case for claiming recession risk had spiked was always weak, based on a broad set of published numbers. But if you monitor economic risk based on headlines and single-factor metrics, it’s easy to get whipsawed in the art/science of evaluating the US macro trend in real time.

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* US jobless claims fall for second week in sign of labor market resiliency
* US homebuilder sentiment falls to eight-month low In August
* US industrial output drops in July by most since the start of the year
* NY Fed Mfg Index stays negative in August
* US retail spending rises much more than expected in July:

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