For all his evident talents as a geostrategist, I’d never had Osama bin Laden down as much of a markets guy.

I know his family is well-versed in the Middle East construction business and that he is once thought to have written a rather audacious call option on US airline stocks in the days before 9/11. But he has been rather more into demolition than construction of late and if he ever did make that infamous airline trade, you’d have to acknowledge he had the benefit of some unusually good inside information. In any case, being forced to live in a cave for the past six years somewhere on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border must have rather limited his effectiveness as an investment guru.

Yet there he was on our TV screens again last week, sporting a new look and dilating happily on the state of the US economy.

He took the opportunity of the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks to branch out from his usual theological strictures and offer a rolling lecture to Americans on, among other things, global warming (bad), the writings of Noam Chomsky (good) and a priceless little observation about “the reeling of many of you under the burden of interest-related debts, insane taxes and real estate mortgages”.

So there you have it. If the US sub-prime mortgage crisis has reached into the inner sanctums of the al-Qaeda leadership bunker, you know it must be pretty serious.

The man’s timing, as it happened, was impeccable. On the very day he released his video, the US Government released another unpleasant surprise. The employment data for August were a bigger horror show than Osama’s ridiculous ramblings. The decline in non-farm payrolls of 4,000 was the first monthly fall in four years. Worse, given that we can always hope that one month’s figures don’t represent a trend, was the downward revision to the previous two months’ data. In the three months to the end of August, America’s job creation slowed to an average of just 47,000 a month. To put these numbers in perspective, the United States needs to create about 120,000 jobs each month just to find employment for its expanding workforce, so if demand for workers is growing at a third of that pace, you’ve got serious trouble.

And there was something even worse. Though the unemployment rate held steady at a very healthy 4.6 per cent, this was only because huge numbers of people left the workforce last month. The jobless rate measures those out of work as a proportion of those in work and those not in work but looking for a job. When you give up looking, you drop out of the data entirely.

These figures are certainly consistent with a sharp slowdown in the US economy. They were bad enough to warrant serious consideration now of the question: is the US headed for its first recession in six years? Or put it this way: are bin Laden and his friends finally going to get their hearts’ desire and see the US tip into its first slump since their efforts six years ago to the day actually helped it to emerge from its last one?

The simple answer is: we don’t know. But here are some pointers for the next few nervous weeks.

First, the data do not yet suggest that a recession is upon us. The economy had considerable momentum (a 4 per cent growth rate) going into the third quarter of the year. A weakening labour market and softness in consumer spending in July and August will slow that momentum significantly, but should not necessarily halt it completely.

Secondly, the Federal Reserve will now certainly cut interest rates to soften the blow. As I have argued repeatedly in the past few weeks, the whole debate about whether the Fed should or should not cut rates in response to the financial turbulence of August is an empty one. Now we have evidence that the economy is slowing dangerously, the central bank will throw supposed “moral hazard” concerns to the winds. The Fed Funds rate, at 5.25 per cent, is now well over 250 basis points in real (inflation-adjusted) terms. A weak economy demands a much lower real cost of borrowing and I now suspect that the Fed will cut the rate at its policy-setting meeting next week by 50 basis points and will follow with further cuts later in the year.

This will help to lift confidence, of course, but it won’t have much immediate macroeconomic impact - monetary policy typically operates with a lag of six months or more.

Thirdly, the global economy is in robust shape. This is a welcome reversal of events from most of the last decade, when the US and to a lesser extent China were providing the bulk of global growth. US domestic demand could slow significantly in the coming months but be offset at least in part by an improved external performance.

On the other hand, the big uncertainty is that we don’t have a real clue yet about the economic impact of the credit crunch. The August employment report will have largely reflected conditions when the squeeze was just beginning to bite over the summer. The housing market seems certain to weaken further and many employers may now be struggling to raise funds from nervous banks and frosty credit markets.

It’s still possible that August was just a bad month – we have had them before in periods of sustained expansion. But – and I want this to be understood in only the very narrowest of terms – Osama was right. The US economy is in perilous waters right now. While recession is not inevitable, perhaps not even probable, it just got significantly more possible.

gerard.baker@thetimes.co.uk

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