Disposable Personal Income Signalling Recession

As I mentioned yesterday, the GDP number that came out, while positive, has a few issues with it. One of them being the fact that the annual growth rate for quarterly real personal disposable income only grew by 0.4%. Today, we received an update which provided us with the monthly data, with September growth at 0.2%. To put it into perspective, take a look at this chart from the Federal Reserve's FRED database with the recessions shaded:

As you can see, the level we are currently at is usually associated with recession (though there have been 3 1-month long anomalies in the data, the most recent due to Hurricane Katrina) and in fact, in half of the recessions in the last 50 years we never even made it this low.