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For a country like the United States, recessions are at least somewhat like Tinker Bell. It's hard for external factors to seriously impact the US economy Mult

For a country like the United States, recessions are at least somewhat like Tinker Bell. It's hard for external factors to seriously impact the US economy Multiple trade wars precipitated by the current president certainly impact the US economy (and the global one). The coming global downturn will be almost entirely self-inflicted, but it won't be down to gossip about a possible recession, it'll be down to massive trade barriers imposed by fiat. Trade wars are bad and hard to win.

ericd 7y ago
We’ve been stacking tinder for a very long time with our monetary policy, as well as shifting demographics. The trade war might be the spark, but a spark on a clean forest floor doesn’t do much.
dodobirdlord 7y ago
"It's hard" and "it's impossible" are very different beasts, and I said the former and not the latter. I think that the fact that the US economy is still growing despite disastrous trade policy and oncoming global downturn illustrates my point. Years of national and global scale economic mismanagement haven't yet managed to drive the US economy into recession. (Also, the Fed is pretty good at its job.) In comparison, during the financial crisis, issues with a particular asset class in the US economy within months causes a worldwide recession due to increased assessment of credit risk and corresponding tightening of lending that had to be mitigated with massive bailouts to prevent a death spiral. As a further example, during the financial crisis many banks in perfectly healthy condition were forced to take bailouts so as not to inflame the perception that certain banks could not be trusted.