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So are we trusting the media now? Or is it all fake news? Not sure what you guys are doing but I will still be buying. When everyone says recession it’s most l

So are we trusting the media now? Or is it all fake news? Not sure what you guys are doing but I will still be buying. When everyone says recession it’s most likely baloney. Events like 2008 and 1929 and 1987 come out of nowhere as a surprise, not as a warning news announcement on MSNBC (seriously just inverse everything they say )

paul7986 7y ago
That's what I'm thinking and wondered are all red and blue news outlets reporting this the same? Is it just the ones with the opposite political agenda? Because the boon economy we been experiencing is a huge positive for the person in office now and their possible re-election.
- jerf 7y ago
  The economy bleeding is the economy leading. Even if it isn't, it's still a more exciting story than "everything's probably fine for now". I believe there are plenty of people who would in a heartbeat spark a recession for millions of people as long as it let them get rid of Trump. In the spirit of "A single death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic", the cognitively-available benefit of getting rid of Trump would dominate the vague and diffuse "some people somewhere might get hurt" that would entail. (And that is granting them the benefit of the doubt that they'd even care about it if they could managed to grapple with it, a theory I don't particularly have a lot of evidence for.) However, it's too early for that. If a recession hits now, there's time for the economy to recover before the election and the recession to just be a memory in our ever-increasingly news cycle driver news economy. "What recession? Oh, you mean the one from 150 news cycles ago? Who cares?" "They" would want it in full swing somewhere around the election, and would settle for the worst bits being a month or two before the election. I tend to think this is just the media echo chamber picking up an idea.
  - akhilcacharya 7y ago
    I'm old enough to remember Trump claiming that the economy was in shambles in 2015 and 2016 when it isn't remarkably different than it is now. Almost as though that was a big part of his message! Bring on the gloom and doom, it's not much different than what we had from 2014 onwards.
  - briandear 7y ago
    Some pretty sick people that would actually wish harm and suffering on people just to win an election. There was a Duke psychiatrist on TV the other day that actually said Trump will kill more people than Mao, Stalin, and Hitler combined. A “respected” psychiatrist saying such nonsense that Trump is on course to exterminating 50+ million people! And now we have the media hyping up recession talks with wishful thinking. A former Canadian prime minister is “rooting” for the hurricane to destroy Mar a Lago in Florida just to teach Trump a lesson. What an evil person: wishing death and destruction on people because they disagree with their political views. There is the climate doomsday cult that seems exactly like the Catholic Church during the Inquisition: you either accept the “truth” or you get burned at the stake. It has become just as nutso as the most persistant cults ever on earth. We are constantly being told that the world is literally ending in 12 years. Yet, unless there is some nuclear war, we all know that to be false. But still, it sells “bibles” and gets votes. Some people really are deranged. My personal situation has been just fine under Trump. If people turned off the news and just looked at their own situation, most people would probably say they are doing pretty ok if not better than ok. People should vote on how well they are personally doing, not on how well the media tells them everyone else might be doing. Basically, everyone needs to calm down and stop wishing death, destruction, or financial ruin on people just to get someone elected. That’s sick.
    - PhasmaFelis 7y ago
      I can see your point in general, but arguing for civility and human kindness in the same breath that you praise Trump is pretty damn ironic.
  - gerbilly 7y ago
    > I believe there are plenty of people who would in a heartbeat spark a recession for millions of people as long as it let them get rid of Trump. Geez, I don't think anyone was implying that was the reason the media was talking recession. Do you know any reporters, and are you familiar with how they work? I do, and none of them just make up stories the way you are implying. I suggest that when people imply 'fake news', that the burden of proof be placed on them.
    - jerf 7y ago
      I didn't say it would be reporters. They pretty much just relay things from people in the financial business, who have a whole range of interests of their own. Reporters would have very limited ability to independently decide there's a recession coming, just as they have a limited ability to come to their own conclusions in any other domain. Bear in mind we live in a world where this happened: https://slate.com/business/2019/08/william-dudley-fed-trump-interest-rates-economy.amp https://slate.com/business/2019/08/william-dudley-fed-trump-... (Note: generally liberal site, not a foxnews or brietbart pick.) It's not exactly a crazy conspiracy theory when the former head of the Fed is openly talking about this sort of thing. I mean, quite the contrary; you've got to pay attention to that sort of source! If that's out in the open, what do you think is going on behind closed doors?
      - gerbilly 7y ago
        The reporters I know won't publish a claim without two or more independent sources.
        jerf 7y ago
        It would probably be a challenge to find a time when reporters couldn't find two people who think bad times are just around the corner. Predicting recession is the economic equivalent of the first post on HN being disagreement with the posted article, and just as popular. And that's long before accounting for the possibility of agendas skewing what people say, since I hardly believe our financial system is run by disinterested angels, or by people who inexplicably have failed to notice how much power they have when they open their mouth. You don't stand a chance of convincing me that all of the participants in this process are just upstanding folks who wouldn't dream of doing anything untoward and that there's nobody would even spare a single thought for how they might manipulate the system for their own goals. The pile of evidence you'd have to present to overcome the pile of evidence that we all have (not just me) to the contrary is too large to fit on planet Earth.
- akhilcacharya 7y ago
  > Because the boon economy we been experiencing is a huge positive for the person in office now and their possible re-election. If it s why are they trailing all competitors? Why do they have a -10 to -20 point net job approval even in the same polls where they get good marks on the economy?
noitsnot 7y ago
Analysts and media keep referencing those years comparing it to where we are now. They are more than a recession, they are a catastrophe.
imglorp 7y ago
There were plenty of warning signs in 2008: yield curve, declining housing starts, etc. So it was not a surprise. The surprise was specifically which day everyone decided to panic and sell. https://www.thebalance.com/the-great-recession-of-2008-explanation-with-dates-4056832 https://www.thebalance.com/the-great-recession-of-2008-expla...
- chucksmash 7y ago
  In 2007 I had a summer job as a gopher/assistant for a residential real estate appraiser. I remember thinking being an appraiser was an amazing gig when I started the summer and was entertaining the idea of staying on during the school year as a practicum rather than going back immediately. We were doing two houses a day, every day. Turning away work. Some appraisers were grinding, doing three a day even (figure about four hours each if you're working fast but actually doing the work). Baseline fee for a residential appraisal then was $300 for houses worth less than $1 million. The opportunity to earn $900/day is a heady notion for a broke college student, especially given you just had to measure people's houses, take pictures, look up comps, and file some paperwork. By the time I went back to school, we couldn't rely on even one house on a given day. I didn't have any insight about the overall situation (i.e. there were plenty of reasonable explanations, maybe the lender found someone willing to give them more favorable appraisals, etc), but the effect was pronounced.
criley2 7y ago
2008 was not a surprise, and it didn't come out of nowhere. Predicting the specific time the crash would happen was a bit like fortune telling but from 2006 on a growing number of economists and analysts began flashing an ever increasing number of warning signs. There were even a few major warning signs before the summer of 07 when things went crazy. Economists and analysts use a wide variety of measures to predict if the economy will begin contracting, losing jobs, and potentially if that economy will start a death spiral of income loss -> spending decline -> revenue decrease -> layoffs -> income loss requiring government intervention at some stage to stop spiralling (or ya know bottom out) Depending on who you listen to, they use everything from manufacturing outputs, energy futures, consumer confidence indexes, 2/10 year bond spread, unemployment rates/claims, average wages, consumer goods sales, manufacturing supply indexes, the S&P 500 performance, inflation and money supply... Ultimately a good combination of data to predict recessions makes something like the oil temperature gauge in your car. If the temp is high, is your engine going bad? Not necessarily. But if the temp is high, is something going wrong? Probably.
legulere 7y ago
In 2007 there was already an increased amount of search for recession going on on google, but less than now: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=Recession https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=Recessio...
dragonwriter 7y ago
> Events like 2008 and 1929 and 1987 come out of nowhere as a surprise, No, they don't. Lots of people, in pretty much every media outlet, were saying a collapse of the type that occurred, with very much the specific trigger (housing bubble collapse) that it occurred, was imminent for a couple years leading up to it in the run up to the 2008 collapse. Like every notable economic commenter from every different school that usually agree on nothing. Maybe fee people were paying attention, but definitely lots of people were sounding the alarm.
- matthewdgreen 7y ago
  People were sounding the alarm about the housing bubble, but they didn't realize it would lead to a systemic crisis in the banking system (because so many banks had filled their balance sheet with securitized debt instruments.)
  - dragonwriter 7y ago
    > People were sounding the alarm about the housing bubble, but they didn't realize it would lead to a systemic crisis in the banking system (because so many banks had filled their balance sheet with securitized debt instruments.) A number of leading voices, across the spectrum, did predict that.

paul7986 7y ago

That's what I'm thinking and wondered are all red and blue news outlets reporting this the same? Is it just the ones with the opposite political agenda? Because the boon economy we been experiencing is a huge positive for the person in office now and their possible re-election.

jerf 7y ago
The economy bleeding is the economy leading. Even if it isn't, it's still a more exciting story than "everything's probably fine for now". I believe there are plenty of people who would in a heartbeat spark a recession for millions of people as long as it let them get rid of Trump. In the spirit of "A single death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic", the cognitively-available benefit of getting rid of Trump would dominate the vague and diffuse "some people somewhere might get hurt" that would entail. (And that is granting them the benefit of the doubt that they'd even care about it if they could managed to grapple with it, a theory I don't particularly have a lot of evidence for.) However, it's too early for that. If a recession hits now, there's time for the economy to recover before the election and the recession to just be a memory in our ever-increasingly news cycle driver news economy. "What recession? Oh, you mean the one from 150 news cycles ago? Who cares?" "They" would want it in full swing somewhere around the election, and would settle for the worst bits being a month or two before the election. I tend to think this is just the media echo chamber picking up an idea.
- akhilcacharya 7y ago
  I'm old enough to remember Trump claiming that the economy was in shambles in 2015 and 2016 when it isn't remarkably different than it is now. Almost as though that was a big part of his message! Bring on the gloom and doom, it's not much different than what we had from 2014 onwards.
- briandear 7y ago
  Some pretty sick people that would actually wish harm and suffering on people just to win an election. There was a Duke psychiatrist on TV the other day that actually said Trump will kill more people than Mao, Stalin, and Hitler combined. A “respected” psychiatrist saying such nonsense that Trump is on course to exterminating 50+ million people! And now we have the media hyping up recession talks with wishful thinking. A former Canadian prime minister is “rooting” for the hurricane to destroy Mar a Lago in Florida just to teach Trump a lesson. What an evil person: wishing death and destruction on people because they disagree with their political views. There is the climate doomsday cult that seems exactly like the Catholic Church during the Inquisition: you either accept the “truth” or you get burned at the stake. It has become just as nutso as the most persistant cults ever on earth. We are constantly being told that the world is literally ending in 12 years. Yet, unless there is some nuclear war, we all know that to be false. But still, it sells “bibles” and gets votes. Some people really are deranged. My personal situation has been just fine under Trump. If people turned off the news and just looked at their own situation, most people would probably say they are doing pretty ok if not better than ok. People should vote on how well they are personally doing, not on how well the media tells them everyone else might be doing. Basically, everyone needs to calm down and stop wishing death, destruction, or financial ruin on people just to get someone elected. That’s sick.
  - PhasmaFelis 7y ago
    I can see your point in general, but arguing for civility and human kindness in the same breath that you praise Trump is pretty damn ironic.
- gerbilly 7y ago
  > I believe there are plenty of people who would in a heartbeat spark a recession for millions of people as long as it let them get rid of Trump. Geez, I don't think anyone was implying that was the reason the media was talking recession. Do you know any reporters, and are you familiar with how they work? I do, and none of them just make up stories the way you are implying. I suggest that when people imply 'fake news', that the burden of proof be placed on them.
  - jerf 7y ago
    I didn't say it would be reporters. They pretty much just relay things from people in the financial business, who have a whole range of interests of their own. Reporters would have very limited ability to independently decide there's a recession coming, just as they have a limited ability to come to their own conclusions in any other domain. Bear in mind we live in a world where this happened: https://slate.com/business/2019/08/william-dudley-fed-trump-interest-rates-economy.amp https://slate.com/business/2019/08/william-dudley-fed-trump-... (Note: generally liberal site, not a foxnews or brietbart pick.) It's not exactly a crazy conspiracy theory when the former head of the Fed is openly talking about this sort of thing. I mean, quite the contrary; you've got to pay attention to that sort of source! If that's out in the open, what do you think is going on behind closed doors?
    - gerbilly 7y ago
      The reporters I know won't publish a claim without two or more independent sources.
      - jerf 7y ago
        It would probably be a challenge to find a time when reporters couldn't find two people who think bad times are just around the corner. Predicting recession is the economic equivalent of the first post on HN being disagreement with the posted article, and just as popular. And that's long before accounting for the possibility of agendas skewing what people say, since I hardly believe our financial system is run by disinterested angels, or by people who inexplicably have failed to notice how much power they have when they open their mouth. You don't stand a chance of convincing me that all of the participants in this process are just upstanding folks who wouldn't dream of doing anything untoward and that there's nobody would even spare a single thought for how they might manipulate the system for their own goals. The pile of evidence you'd have to present to overcome the pile of evidence that we all have (not just me) to the contrary is too large to fit on planet Earth.
akhilcacharya 7y ago
> Because the boon economy we been experiencing is a huge positive for the person in office now and their possible re-election. If it s why are they trailing all competitors? Why do they have a -10 to -20 point net job approval even in the same polls where they get good marks on the economy?

noitsnot 7y ago

Analysts and media keep referencing those years comparing it to where we are now. They are more than a recession, they are a catastrophe.

imglorp 7y ago

There were plenty of warning signs in 2008: yield curve, declining housing starts, etc. So it was not a surprise. The surprise was specifically which day everyone decided to panic and sell. https://www.thebalance.com/the-great-recession-of-2008-explanation-with-dates-4056832 https://www.thebalance.com/the-great-recession-of-2008-expla...

chucksmash 7y ago
In 2007 I had a summer job as a gopher/assistant for a residential real estate appraiser. I remember thinking being an appraiser was an amazing gig when I started the summer and was entertaining the idea of staying on during the school year as a practicum rather than going back immediately. We were doing two houses a day, every day. Turning away work. Some appraisers were grinding, doing three a day even (figure about four hours each if you're working fast but actually doing the work). Baseline fee for a residential appraisal then was $300 for houses worth less than $1 million. The opportunity to earn $900/day is a heady notion for a broke college student, especially given you just had to measure people's houses, take pictures, look up comps, and file some paperwork. By the time I went back to school, we couldn't rely on even one house on a given day. I didn't have any insight about the overall situation (i.e. there were plenty of reasonable explanations, maybe the lender found someone willing to give them more favorable appraisals, etc), but the effect was pronounced.

criley2 7y ago

2008 was not a surprise, and it didn't come out of nowhere. Predicting the specific time the crash would happen was a bit like fortune telling but from 2006 on a growing number of economists and analysts began flashing an ever increasing number of warning signs. There were even a few major warning signs before the summer of 07 when things went crazy. Economists and analysts use a wide variety of measures to predict if the economy will begin contracting, losing jobs, and potentially if that economy will start a death spiral of income loss -> spending decline -> revenue decrease -> layoffs -> income loss requiring government intervention at some stage to stop spiralling (or ya know bottom out) Depending on who you listen to, they use everything from manufacturing outputs, energy futures, consumer confidence indexes, 2/10 year bond spread, unemployment rates/claims, average wages, consumer goods sales, manufacturing supply indexes, the S&P 500 performance, inflation and money supply... Ultimately a good combination of data to predict recessions makes something like the oil temperature gauge in your car. If the temp is high, is your engine going bad? Not necessarily. But if the temp is high, is something going wrong? Probably.

legulere 7y ago

In 2007 there was already an increased amount of search for recession going on on google, but less than now: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=Recession https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=Recessio...

dragonwriter 7y ago

> Events like 2008 and 1929 and 1987 come out of nowhere as a surprise, No, they don't. Lots of people, in pretty much every media outlet, were saying a collapse of the type that occurred, with very much the specific trigger (housing bubble collapse) that it occurred, was imminent for a couple years leading up to it in the run up to the 2008 collapse. Like every notable economic commenter from every different school that usually agree on nothing. Maybe fee people were paying attention, but definitely lots of people were sounding the alarm.

matthewdgreen 7y ago
People were sounding the alarm about the housing bubble, but they didn't realize it would lead to a systemic crisis in the banking system (because so many banks had filled their balance sheet with securitized debt instruments.)
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  > People were sounding the alarm about the housing bubble, but they didn't realize it would lead to a systemic crisis in the banking system (because so many banks had filled their balance sheet with securitized debt instruments.) A number of leading voices, across the spectrum, did predict that.