8 ms·

How the recession doomers got the U.S. economy so wrong

44 points by ecliptik 3y ago

downrightmike 3y ago
The market detached in 2020 from the economy and that's why we had a K type recovery. Its like Whose Line is it Anyways? Everything is made up and the points don't matter.
mindcrime 3y ago
"Economists correctly predicted 13 of the last 10 recessions".
- hardware2win 3y ago
  That would be insanely good Id say Dont they predict like 15 out of last 3?
- MrPatan 3y ago
  13 of the last 2
nine_zeros 3y ago
Pretty sure a recession happens when everyone thinks "this time is different".
kneebonian 3y ago
> Last October, a Bloomberg economic model said that the odds of a U.S. recession this year were 100 percent. Maybe we're not officially in a "recession" but you can't look around and tell me most people feel the economy is doing super great right now.
- yardie 3y ago
  The economy is doing super great and that is the problem. The old trick was to pump up the rates until unemployment increases and demand drops. They tried it and it's not working.
  - mensetmanusman 3y ago
    Labor market is too tight, everyone wants workers.
    - the_only_law 3y ago
      Then why the hell aren’t they responding to my applications.
      - mensetmanusman 3y ago
        On average the labor market can be tight while other areas can have a surplus of talent. Sometimes this requires a reframing of what one’s talents are when applying for jobs outside what one might consider a normal window. Also, I might recommend getting a recruiter to work for you to throw more mud on the wall so to speak.
      - lotsofpulp 3y ago
        Lots of fast food/hotels/nursing homes/transportation/etc businesses will respond to applications.
        the_only_law 3y ago
        Hell I’ve tried those just to get some income coming in, but nothing. They claim “fast hiring process”, and then it’s two weeks later and I just see the same damn positions reposted.
        mensetmanusman 3y ago
        Tried government?
        the_only_law 3y ago
        Yeah mostly rejected because I didn’t tick every single box(e.g. no degree, didn’t have experience in hyper-specific domain, etc.)
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  > but you can't look around and tell me most people feel the economy is doing super great right now. Consumer confidence (Conference Board) present situation index is the highest its been in two years, even though not at the extreme highs it was sitting at pre-COVID, but, yeah, I can tell you exactly that, with pretty strong evidence. Are most people in a precarious situation as is the norm in a mostly-capitalist economy? Yes. But that’s part of the long-term baseline.
- jfengel 3y ago
  "The economy" is at least two separate things. One is the sum total of goods and services. Measuring it is always a bit dicey but the metrics are doing reasonably well. The second is how much money people have, in terms of its ability to buy stuff. That can be subjective, especially when the objective measures are contradictory, as they are now. Ideally the two would be somewhat correlated. When the first definition is doing great and the second isn't, people get cranky because their work isn't bringing them wealth and stability. That is a systemic problem that goes even beyond today's economy.
JKCalhoun 3y ago
> Yes, problems exist. Essentials such as housing, education, and health care are still too expensive; wages could be growing faster; and last year’s inflation is still baked into today’s prices. I suspect this is where the disconnect between the public perception and the data exists.
nemo44x 3y ago
We had a recession and then they redefined it. We also still have a great chance of entering a recession later this year.
- spankalee 3y ago
  They did not redefine it.
  - jtaft 3y ago
    Didn’t they though? Something about two quarters consecutive quarters of negative gdp growth was the original definition, it happened, and they said recession means something else.
    - fnordpiglet 3y ago
      When did it happen? https://www.statista.com/statistics/188185/percent-change-from-preceding-period-in-real-gdp-in-the-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/188185/percent-change-fr... “They” haven’t changed any definitions, I don’t think there’s even a “they,” and there was not a recession by any definition of recession. The fed tried hard to induce one because of wage growth and inflation, but failed to do so. Companies in tech specifically fired a ton of people in preparation, but that doesn’t make a recession - just bad business judgement. Tech leadership has never been super sharp to begin with.
    - dragontamer 3y ago
      National Bureau of Economic Research declares recessions in the USA. Always have. If they don't say it's a recession, it isn't one. ------ What is consistent is that the economists there declare recessions way too late in practice. I think they declared a recession dated in 2007 in the year 2009, when we were already recovering. So what we have are a bunch of internet bloggers who try to call a recession before the experts. But all that happens in practice is that the bloggers call a recession every 3 months since 2010 hoping that they're correct today. ----- If we are in a recession today, we will know for sure maybe next year. That's just how it works on this issue, and it's premature to call it any sooner.
ofslidingfeet 3y ago
As someone holding long expiry puts, glad to finally see articles like this!
jokethrowaway 3y ago
We had a recession, as per its definition. Then politics happen and didn't want to name things as they are.
- fnordpiglet 3y ago
  What is the definition of a recession you’re operating under? The typical definition is two consecutive quarters of negative gdp growth. We’ve not seen that since 4q19 and 1q20, then not since the “Great Recession.” https://www.statista.com/statistics/188185/percent-change-from-preceding-period-in-real-gdp-in-the-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/188185/percent-change-fr...
  - eis 3y ago
    Q1 and Q2 of 2022 were negative growth. The past 4 quarters were not and Q2 of 2022 was just barely. So technically there was a brief recession in H1 of 2022. Right now there is no clear sign of a recession as per definition. I think recessions are also widely misunderstood as being a binary thing. Like going from "everything is A-OK" to "OMG it's all going to shite". There can be a recession which people barely feel. It's not like an event horizon from which there is no turning back.
- qbasic_forever 3y ago
  There's also been a ton of quietly revising numbers down months later. I don't think GDP has revised down negative much yet, but stuff like unemployment and hiring numbers have been extremely volatile and sometimes revised to complete opposites (strong positive to strong negative numbers) months after the fact.
scrlk 3y ago
> "Economy faces risks, not recession: Bernanke" (2007-11-08) > "Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke told lawmakers on Thursday the U.S. economy did not appear headed for recession, but warned growth could prove weaker than expected and inflation higher." https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-bernanke-idUSWBT00789120071108 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-bernanke-idUSWBT00789...
nextworddev 3y ago
This is the signal I needed to bet on recession
mensetmanusman 3y ago
Our company fired a bunch of talent and I know we are going to struggle to grow now because demand for time is off the charts. If only all our companies weren’t run by the same monoculture of ivy grads with the same excel sheets taking orders from the moves of the Fed.
- kragen 3y ago
  what do you mean by 'demand for time is off the charts' is there like a market where i can buy a couple of years, new in box, to add to my life
  - bmelton 3y ago
    Assume you have a product (x) that you are considering building. If you can get to market quickly, you can maybe grow revenues or whatever. X will take 48 person-months to complete 48 person months is 48 months with 1 persons 48 person months is 24 months with 2 persons 48 person months is 12 months with 4 persons etc When time to market is critical, companies will often choose to "buy time" by paying people to cut the time requirements. The math isn't as linear as I've suggested, but most of the time, for most of the projects, you can increase velocity made good by adding people to a project.
    - kragen 3y ago
      this seems like a plausible guess about what mensetmanusman meant but usually people refer to this as 'demand for labor' rather than 'demand for time' so i'm not sure
      - mensetmanusman 3y ago
        That’s what I meant. Demand for time is how I experience the labor shortage, so it seemed more suitable :)
        kragen 3y ago
peepeepoopoo23 3y ago
Top signal.
soderfoo 3y ago
Does anyone else have difficulty reconciling these Happy Days Are Here Again type articles, with the more somber slice of life type? For example, I came across this article titled The Tragedy of Being a New Mom in America immediately after reading this article about the economy [0]. The contrast between 'everything is great' and 'everything is terrible' seems stark. [0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/mothers-mental-health-women-postpartum-depression-7b548f43 https://www.wsj.com/articles/mothers-mental-health-women-pos...
- jackmott42 3y ago
  Real life everything still seems terrible. Prices are high, salaries are not adjusted to match, service and quality and availability of everything is worse. More things are broken and take longer to fix.
- brmgb 3y ago
  The issue is modern newspapers. They need to generate traffic and impressions so they go for what people click and what people click is not thoughtful, researched, and nuanced articles on what’s happening. What people click is bold titles and articles with strong arguable points made somewhat forcefully. That’s why you see jarring articles. What passes nowadays for journalists need an angle for you to read their rag. The solution is to stop reading daily newspapers and focus on the few remaining publications which can still afford to stay afloat while doing quality work while they last.
- mindcrime 3y ago
  I've been thinking about that lately. It seems like, depending on which source(s) you follow, you could easily convince yourself of either position: "everything is great" OR "everything is terrible". I find myself struggling to disambiguate which is more real. That's one big reason I recently started contemplating taking a cross-country trip across the US, by bus. That it, just head from NC to CA, then turn around and come back. I expect doing something like that would offer a real "ground truth" perspective of a large swathe of America. The only problem is finding the time to do it. I think it would be a rewarding experience, but my $DAYJOB employer might not be as enthusiastic.
- 3y ago
froggertoaster 3y ago
https://archive.is/q5QOD https://archive.is/q5QOD
helsinkiandrew 3y ago
To me a lot of economists and forecasters this year have looked very much like technical analyst stock pickers, buying or selling a stock based on the shape of the price curve. Except that the amount of economic data is far to low to make statistically safe predictions. How many previous times have we had a lockdown, followed by a war in Ukraine, followed by …
AYBABTME 3y ago
I just don't buy it. Everything is in limbo, house inventory is very low because no one sells their low interest mortgage. Commercial real estate is going to blow up any day. The stock market is buoyed by a few companies in AI craze. Startups are getting a lot less funding than before. Barely any IPOs in sight. Large investments are made by governments on borrowed money. It seems to me that the only way things aren't awful, is because people are holding on for dear life and minimizing their burn rate. But the wall is coming, just very slowly. That's just my impression, I'm not an expert. I would prefer being wrong.
- gochi 3y ago
  I too would prefer being wrong, and I have a hard time reconciling the common position during the mass layoffs that they were aware of what's coming, yet simultaneously everything is perfectly fine. If companies were wrong, shouldn't that be a gigantic concern they got away with laying off hundreds of thousands for no reason? If they're right, then articles trying to convince us everything is fine is surely alarming!
  - GoodJokes 3y ago
    [dead]
  - 0xDEF 3y ago
    American Big Tech companies laying off highly paid specialized tech workers doesn't say much about the rest of the economy. We already knew that most of the Big Tech companies are houses of cards built around one core profitable business like Google's Ad business. The rest of society has no problem finding jobs. The problem is that almost no jobs pay enough to buy housing in places millennials and Gen Z consider desirable.
    - 88913527 3y ago
      The top quintile makes up a disproportionate portion of total consumption, so 1 laid off high-earning worker can have more second-order effects than 1 laid off middle-quintile earner.
nomilk 3y ago
Didn't the US have 10% inflation for 2 years. That's a 20% reduction in everyone's real cash balances. Imagine if you had $100k savings in the bank and you were suddenly required to pay a once-off tax of $20k paid off over 2 years. There'd be riots. It's the same thing administered differently.
- brianwawok 3y ago
  That is a bit of an exaggeration. https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/current-inflation-rates/ https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/current-infl... 4.7% in 2021 8% in 2022 4%????? in 2023. if normal is about 2%.. we are looking at something like 11% "extra" inflation over 3 years. Which isn't nothing, but isn't 20%.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - lotsofpulp 3y ago
    It depends on what assets you were expecting to buy. If you already owned land, did not need daycare, locked into low property taxes by law, did not need to spend for higher education/certifications/etc, yes. If you were expecting to buy a home with certain qualities in a certain location, then you might have experienced a loss (in terms of material expectations of quality of life) worth tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars during the last few years.
  - KurnReeser 3y ago
    Your numbers leave out fuel/utilities and rent/housing increases. I can tell you that I kept every receipt, virtual and paper, starting July 1st 2021 and going through December 31st 2022. Running the numbers in March when I got around to it: My cost of living (with my lifestyle not changing!) went up 20.94% over those 18 months. It's gone up more since then but I don't know exactly how much - say, 5%-10% Our economy is "doing fine" because we've printed and spent 10 trillion dollars. That bill will come due, along with the bill for the other 20 trillion dollars we've printed and spent over the previous 20 years. If you're over 65 and live an average lifespan all this won't matter much to you. If you're under 45 and middle class (or lower down) you'll never retire, but your grand-kids might.
broken_clock 3y ago
It's very strange to me how sentiment on the American economy is still so poor. Yes, the economy is worse than the bubble fueled mania of 2021, or the 2012-2019 years, but guess what? There were massive economic dislocations due to COVID and the related supply chain issues. I don't think that's the reasonable baseline to compare to. If you compare to similar high GDP countries (UK, Germany, France, etc) or high growth countries (mostly China), we are doing amazing. This country has unique economic advantages due to natural resources, geography, and the ability to integrate both skilled and unskilled workers. I think it's hard to form a consistent Doomer thesis about America being a laggard when it comes to economic growth - unless you are comparing only to America's own best years.
Aunche 3y ago
> The Federal Reserve itself projected hundreds of thousands of job losses by this December It's funny that the Atlantic was accusing the Federal Reserve of trying to cause an "Artificial Recession" last December [0]. Now inflation is down, but unemployment is below the Fed's original projections, you'd think that would be a good thing, but now actually they're the ones that are "Doomers." Modern journalism everyone. [0] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/12/us-economy-recession-unemployment-inflation-interest-rates/672379/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/12/us-economy...
r9550684 3y ago
Derek Thompson, the author of the article, is an embedded Capitol Hill hanger-on, and a self-proclaimed politically progressive. It's entirely tone deaf of him to write such an article, and yet here we are. People like him look at the statistics of the historically lowest trust in the press, and blame online conspiracy theories, or similar, yet they fail to look at their own political biases, and examine their writing from the perspective of journalistic integrity, to realize where the blame lies. The article itself is the classical piece of "who are you going to trust, The Atlantic or your own lying eyes" propaganda. the only supporting argument for his assertion of "vibrant economy" are select official statistics, where's the concerns of general population are dismissed on grounds of delusion. as an aside funny thing from the article, he says that half of the u.s. population think that u.s. is in recession but in the immediate next paragraph he says "discounting opinions of tens of millions of Americans." u.s. population is 330 million, so it would be discounting the opinions of hundreds of millions. but I'm sure that was an honest mistake. how about you leave your dc apartment, Derek, and actually interview some people and find out why they think that the economy is doing bad. and then having thus catalogued the grievances, explore them individually and the systemic effects that they might have on subjective experience of economic stability. you know, journalistic work. it's an opinion piece written from the couch, dismissing the concerns of half of the u.s. population by quoting metrics without an attempt to get to the core of the issue.
- yellowapple 3y ago
  Exactly. Half of Americans feel like they're in a recession because they're actively experiencing the financial/economic struggles reminiscent of one. Naturally, the corporate-owned media are eager to ignore this - almost as if they and their corporate owners have a vested interest in fleecing literally everyone else, the rest of society and economy be damned.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
chmod600 3y ago
I was wrong. I definitely thought we'd be in a worse place by now.
chmod600 3y ago
Where does creative destruction fit in here? We are used to discussing things in terms of "good" and "bad", but what are the consequences of a boom that doesn't seem to be busting?
- friend_and_foe 3y ago
  I liken it to artificially staving off wildfires in a forest that thrives on them. Over time your overhead builds up, there's diminishing returns, and then the fires happen and they're catastrophic. Nothing is allowed to die in the US economy anymore. Everything is too big to fail. All that does is move risk into the systemic realm and make the entire system more brittle. That, and it stagnates development. You can fudge numbers to say the US economy is doing better than ever while people can't afford to live in a dwelling for only so long. The reality on the ground is very different than the GDP numbers. Something will give.
friend_and_foe 3y ago
Declaring victory already? The US is headed for recession. Houses are half a million dollars, a weeks worth of groceries per person is like 60 bucks, you can't rent an apartment for under 1000 bucks most places, even rural ones, Human beings are getting priced out of the economy across the board. What good is an economy that human beings can't participate in? Isn't the point of an economy to distribute resources to the people in the world? The current state of affairs is simply not viable. Something will give. The longer we let this charade continue and escalate the worse the fallout will be.
P_I_Staker 3y ago
Uh, oh. We got a big recession coming if articles like this are coming out.

44 points by ecliptik 3y ago

The market detached in 2020 from the economy and that's why we had a K type recovery. Its like Whose Line is it Anyways? Everything is made up and the points don't matter.

mindcrime 3y ago

"Economists correctly predicted 13 of the last 10 recessions".

hardware2win 3y ago
That would be insanely good Id say Dont they predict like 15 out of last 3?
MrPatan 3y ago
13 of the last 2

nine_zeros 3y ago

Pretty sure a recession happens when everyone thinks "this time is different".

kneebonian 3y ago

> Last October, a Bloomberg economic model said that the odds of a U.S. recession this year were 100 percent. Maybe we're not officially in a "recession" but you can't look around and tell me most people feel the economy is doing super great right now.

yardie 3y ago
The economy is doing super great and that is the problem. The old trick was to pump up the rates until unemployment increases and demand drops. They tried it and it's not working.
- mensetmanusman 3y ago
  Labor market is too tight, everyone wants workers.
  - the_only_law 3y ago
    Then why the hell aren’t they responding to my applications.
    - mensetmanusman 3y ago
      On average the labor market can be tight while other areas can have a surplus of talent. Sometimes this requires a reframing of what one’s talents are when applying for jobs outside what one might consider a normal window. Also, I might recommend getting a recruiter to work for you to throw more mud on the wall so to speak.
    - lotsofpulp 3y ago
      Lots of fast food/hotels/nursing homes/transportation/etc businesses will respond to applications.
      - the_only_law 3y ago
        Hell I’ve tried those just to get some income coming in, but nothing. They claim “fast hiring process”, and then it’s two weeks later and I just see the same damn positions reposted.
        mensetmanusman 3y ago
        Tried government?
        the_only_law 3y ago
        Yeah mostly rejected because I didn’t tick every single box(e.g. no degree, didn’t have experience in hyper-specific domain, etc.)
dragonwriter 3y ago
> but you can't look around and tell me most people feel the economy is doing super great right now. Consumer confidence (Conference Board) present situation index is the highest its been in two years, even though not at the extreme highs it was sitting at pre-COVID, but, yeah, I can tell you exactly that, with pretty strong evidence. Are most people in a precarious situation as is the norm in a mostly-capitalist economy? Yes. But that’s part of the long-term baseline.
jfengel 3y ago
"The economy" is at least two separate things. One is the sum total of goods and services. Measuring it is always a bit dicey but the metrics are doing reasonably well. The second is how much money people have, in terms of its ability to buy stuff. That can be subjective, especially when the objective measures are contradictory, as they are now. Ideally the two would be somewhat correlated. When the first definition is doing great and the second isn't, people get cranky because their work isn't bringing them wealth and stability. That is a systemic problem that goes even beyond today's economy.

JKCalhoun 3y ago

> Yes, problems exist. Essentials such as housing, education, and health care are still too expensive; wages could be growing faster; and last year’s inflation is still baked into today’s prices. I suspect this is where the disconnect between the public perception and the data exists.

nemo44x 3y ago

We had a recession and then they redefined it. We also still have a great chance of entering a recession later this year.

spankalee 3y ago
They did not redefine it.
- jtaft 3y ago
  Didn’t they though? Something about two quarters consecutive quarters of negative gdp growth was the original definition, it happened, and they said recession means something else.
  - fnordpiglet 3y ago
    When did it happen? https://www.statista.com/statistics/188185/percent-change-from-preceding-period-in-real-gdp-in-the-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/188185/percent-change-fr... “They” haven’t changed any definitions, I don’t think there’s even a “they,” and there was not a recession by any definition of recession. The fed tried hard to induce one because of wage growth and inflation, but failed to do so. Companies in tech specifically fired a ton of people in preparation, but that doesn’t make a recession - just bad business judgement. Tech leadership has never been super sharp to begin with.
  - dragontamer 3y ago
    National Bureau of Economic Research declares recessions in the USA. Always have. If they don't say it's a recession, it isn't one. ------ What is consistent is that the economists there declare recessions way too late in practice. I think they declared a recession dated in 2007 in the year 2009, when we were already recovering. So what we have are a bunch of internet bloggers who try to call a recession before the experts. But all that happens in practice is that the bloggers call a recession every 3 months since 2010 hoping that they're correct today. ----- If we are in a recession today, we will know for sure maybe next year. That's just how it works on this issue, and it's premature to call it any sooner.

ofslidingfeet 3y ago

As someone holding long expiry puts, glad to finally see articles like this!

jokethrowaway 3y ago

We had a recession, as per its definition. Then politics happen and didn't want to name things as they are.

fnordpiglet 3y ago
What is the definition of a recession you’re operating under? The typical definition is two consecutive quarters of negative gdp growth. We’ve not seen that since 4q19 and 1q20, then not since the “Great Recession.” https://www.statista.com/statistics/188185/percent-change-from-preceding-period-in-real-gdp-in-the-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/188185/percent-change-fr...
- eis 3y ago
  Q1 and Q2 of 2022 were negative growth. The past 4 quarters were not and Q2 of 2022 was just barely. So technically there was a brief recession in H1 of 2022. Right now there is no clear sign of a recession as per definition. I think recessions are also widely misunderstood as being a binary thing. Like going from "everything is A-OK" to "OMG it's all going to shite". There can be a recession which people barely feel. It's not like an event horizon from which there is no turning back.
qbasic_forever 3y ago
There's also been a ton of quietly revising numbers down months later. I don't think GDP has revised down negative much yet, but stuff like unemployment and hiring numbers have been extremely volatile and sometimes revised to complete opposites (strong positive to strong negative numbers) months after the fact.

scrlk 3y ago

> "Economy faces risks, not recession: Bernanke" (2007-11-08) > "Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke told lawmakers on Thursday the U.S. economy did not appear headed for recession, but warned growth could prove weaker than expected and inflation higher." https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-bernanke-idUSWBT00789120071108 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-bernanke-idUSWBT00789...

nextworddev 3y ago

This is the signal I needed to bet on recession

mensetmanusman 3y ago

Our company fired a bunch of talent and I know we are going to struggle to grow now because demand for time is off the charts. If only all our companies weren’t run by the same monoculture of ivy grads with the same excel sheets taking orders from the moves of the Fed.

kragen 3y ago
what do you mean by 'demand for time is off the charts' is there like a market where i can buy a couple of years, new in box, to add to my life
- bmelton 3y ago
  Assume you have a product (x) that you are considering building. If you can get to market quickly, you can maybe grow revenues or whatever. X will take 48 person-months to complete 48 person months is 48 months with 1 persons 48 person months is 24 months with 2 persons 48 person months is 12 months with 4 persons etc When time to market is critical, companies will often choose to "buy time" by paying people to cut the time requirements. The math isn't as linear as I've suggested, but most of the time, for most of the projects, you can increase velocity made good by adding people to a project.
  - kragen 3y ago
    this seems like a plausible guess about what mensetmanusman meant but usually people refer to this as 'demand for labor' rather than 'demand for time' so i'm not sure
    - mensetmanusman 3y ago
      That’s what I meant. Demand for time is how I experience the labor shortage, so it seemed more suitable :)
      - kragen 3y ago

peepeepoopoo23 3y ago

Top signal.

soderfoo 3y ago

Does anyone else have difficulty reconciling these Happy Days Are Here Again type articles, with the more somber slice of life type? For example, I came across this article titled The Tragedy of Being a New Mom in America immediately after reading this article about the economy [0]. The contrast between 'everything is great' and 'everything is terrible' seems stark. [0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/mothers-mental-health-women-postpartum-depression-7b548f43 https://www.wsj.com/articles/mothers-mental-health-women-pos...

jackmott42 3y ago
Real life everything still seems terrible. Prices are high, salaries are not adjusted to match, service and quality and availability of everything is worse. More things are broken and take longer to fix.
brmgb 3y ago
The issue is modern newspapers. They need to generate traffic and impressions so they go for what people click and what people click is not thoughtful, researched, and nuanced articles on what’s happening. What people click is bold titles and articles with strong arguable points made somewhat forcefully. That’s why you see jarring articles. What passes nowadays for journalists need an angle for you to read their rag. The solution is to stop reading daily newspapers and focus on the few remaining publications which can still afford to stay afloat while doing quality work while they last.
mindcrime 3y ago
I've been thinking about that lately. It seems like, depending on which source(s) you follow, you could easily convince yourself of either position: "everything is great" OR "everything is terrible". I find myself struggling to disambiguate which is more real. That's one big reason I recently started contemplating taking a cross-country trip across the US, by bus. That it, just head from NC to CA, then turn around and come back. I expect doing something like that would offer a real "ground truth" perspective of a large swathe of America. The only problem is finding the time to do it. I think it would be a rewarding experience, but my $DAYJOB employer might not be as enthusiastic.
3y ago

froggertoaster 3y ago

https://archive.is/q5QOD https://archive.is/q5QOD

helsinkiandrew 3y ago

To me a lot of economists and forecasters this year have looked very much like technical analyst stock pickers, buying or selling a stock based on the shape of the price curve. Except that the amount of economic data is far to low to make statistically safe predictions. How many previous times have we had a lockdown, followed by a war in Ukraine, followed by …

AYBABTME 3y ago

I just don't buy it. Everything is in limbo, house inventory is very low because no one sells their low interest mortgage. Commercial real estate is going to blow up any day. The stock market is buoyed by a few companies in AI craze. Startups are getting a lot less funding than before. Barely any IPOs in sight. Large investments are made by governments on borrowed money. It seems to me that the only way things aren't awful, is because people are holding on for dear life and minimizing their burn rate. But the wall is coming, just very slowly. That's just my impression, I'm not an expert. I would prefer being wrong.

gochi 3y ago
I too would prefer being wrong, and I have a hard time reconciling the common position during the mass layoffs that they were aware of what's coming, yet simultaneously everything is perfectly fine. If companies were wrong, shouldn't that be a gigantic concern they got away with laying off hundreds of thousands for no reason? If they're right, then articles trying to convince us everything is fine is surely alarming!
- GoodJokes 3y ago
  [dead]
- 0xDEF 3y ago
  American Big Tech companies laying off highly paid specialized tech workers doesn't say much about the rest of the economy. We already knew that most of the Big Tech companies are houses of cards built around one core profitable business like Google's Ad business. The rest of society has no problem finding jobs. The problem is that almost no jobs pay enough to buy housing in places millennials and Gen Z consider desirable.
  - 88913527 3y ago
    The top quintile makes up a disproportionate portion of total consumption, so 1 laid off high-earning worker can have more second-order effects than 1 laid off middle-quintile earner.

nomilk 3y ago

Didn't the US have 10% inflation for 2 years. That's a 20% reduction in everyone's real cash balances. Imagine if you had $100k savings in the bank and you were suddenly required to pay a once-off tax of $20k paid off over 2 years. There'd be riots. It's the same thing administered differently.

brianwawok 3y ago
That is a bit of an exaggeration. https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/current-inflation-rates/ https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/current-infl... 4.7% in 2021 8% in 2022 4%????? in 2023. if normal is about 2%.. we are looking at something like 11% "extra" inflation over 3 years. Which isn't nothing, but isn't 20%.
- deleted 3y ago
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- lotsofpulp 3y ago
  It depends on what assets you were expecting to buy. If you already owned land, did not need daycare, locked into low property taxes by law, did not need to spend for higher education/certifications/etc, yes. If you were expecting to buy a home with certain qualities in a certain location, then you might have experienced a loss (in terms of material expectations of quality of life) worth tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars during the last few years.
- KurnReeser 3y ago
  Your numbers leave out fuel/utilities and rent/housing increases. I can tell you that I kept every receipt, virtual and paper, starting July 1st 2021 and going through December 31st 2022. Running the numbers in March when I got around to it: My cost of living (with my lifestyle not changing!) went up 20.94% over those 18 months. It's gone up more since then but I don't know exactly how much - say, 5%-10% Our economy is "doing fine" because we've printed and spent 10 trillion dollars. That bill will come due, along with the bill for the other 20 trillion dollars we've printed and spent over the previous 20 years. If you're over 65 and live an average lifespan all this won't matter much to you. If you're under 45 and middle class (or lower down) you'll never retire, but your grand-kids might.

broken_clock 3y ago

It's very strange to me how sentiment on the American economy is still so poor. Yes, the economy is worse than the bubble fueled mania of 2021, or the 2012-2019 years, but guess what? There were massive economic dislocations due to COVID and the related supply chain issues. I don't think that's the reasonable baseline to compare to. If you compare to similar high GDP countries (UK, Germany, France, etc) or high growth countries (mostly China), we are doing amazing. This country has unique economic advantages due to natural resources, geography, and the ability to integrate both skilled and unskilled workers. I think it's hard to form a consistent Doomer thesis about America being a laggard when it comes to economic growth - unless you are comparing only to America's own best years.

Aunche 3y ago

> The Federal Reserve itself projected hundreds of thousands of job losses by this December It's funny that the Atlantic was accusing the Federal Reserve of trying to cause an "Artificial Recession" last December [0]. Now inflation is down, but unemployment is below the Fed's original projections, you'd think that would be a good thing, but now actually they're the ones that are "Doomers." Modern journalism everyone. [0] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/12/us-economy-recession-unemployment-inflation-interest-rates/672379/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/12/us-economy...

r9550684 3y ago

Derek Thompson, the author of the article, is an embedded Capitol Hill hanger-on, and a self-proclaimed politically progressive. It's entirely tone deaf of him to write such an article, and yet here we are. People like him look at the statistics of the historically lowest trust in the press, and blame online conspiracy theories, or similar, yet they fail to look at their own political biases, and examine their writing from the perspective of journalistic integrity, to realize where the blame lies. The article itself is the classical piece of "who are you going to trust, The Atlantic or your own lying eyes" propaganda. the only supporting argument for his assertion of "vibrant economy" are select official statistics, where's the concerns of general population are dismissed on grounds of delusion. as an aside funny thing from the article, he says that half of the u.s. population think that u.s. is in recession but in the immediate next paragraph he says "discounting opinions of tens of millions of Americans." u.s. population is 330 million, so it would be discounting the opinions of hundreds of millions. but I'm sure that was an honest mistake. how about you leave your dc apartment, Derek, and actually interview some people and find out why they think that the economy is doing bad. and then having thus catalogued the grievances, explore them individually and the systemic effects that they might have on subjective experience of economic stability. you know, journalistic work. it's an opinion piece written from the couch, dismissing the concerns of half of the u.s. population by quoting metrics without an attempt to get to the core of the issue.

yellowapple 3y ago
Exactly. Half of Americans feel like they're in a recession because they're actively experiencing the financial/economic struggles reminiscent of one. Naturally, the corporate-owned media are eager to ignore this - almost as if they and their corporate owners have a vested interest in fleecing literally everyone else, the rest of society and economy be damned.

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chmod600 3y ago

I was wrong. I definitely thought we'd be in a worse place by now.

chmod600 3y ago

Where does creative destruction fit in here? We are used to discussing things in terms of "good" and "bad", but what are the consequences of a boom that doesn't seem to be busting?

friend_and_foe 3y ago
I liken it to artificially staving off wildfires in a forest that thrives on them. Over time your overhead builds up, there's diminishing returns, and then the fires happen and they're catastrophic. Nothing is allowed to die in the US economy anymore. Everything is too big to fail. All that does is move risk into the systemic realm and make the entire system more brittle. That, and it stagnates development. You can fudge numbers to say the US economy is doing better than ever while people can't afford to live in a dwelling for only so long. The reality on the ground is very different than the GDP numbers. Something will give.

friend_and_foe 3y ago

Declaring victory already? The US is headed for recession. Houses are half a million dollars, a weeks worth of groceries per person is like 60 bucks, you can't rent an apartment for under 1000 bucks most places, even rural ones, Human beings are getting priced out of the economy across the board. What good is an economy that human beings can't participate in? Isn't the point of an economy to distribute resources to the people in the world? The current state of affairs is simply not viable. Something will give. The longer we let this charade continue and escalate the worse the fallout will be.

P_I_Staker 3y ago

Uh, oh. We got a big recession coming if articles like this are coming out.