The United States is close to breaching the threshold for the Federal Reserve’s “Sahm Rule” according to data from the June jobs report. The Data: The Sahm Rule, named for economist Claudia Sahm, is a heuristic measure used by the Federal Reserve to determine whether the U.S. economy is in a recession. The rule has correctly predicted every recession since 1950 with only one false positive in 1959. The Sahm Recession Indicator signals the start of a recession when the three-month moving average of the unemployment rate rises by 0.5% or more relative to the minimum of the three-month averages f…