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2023 - "The US is already in a 'rolling recession'": https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/recession-mild-stock-market-outlook-earnings-economy-labor-

2023 - "The US is already in a 'rolling recession'": https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/recession-mild-stock-market-outlook-earnings-economy-labor-market-strength-2022-11 https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/recession-mi... 2024 - vibe cession: https://www.businessinsider.com/consumers-pessimistic-on-economy-post-rate-cuts-job-hunting-2024-9#:~:text=US%20consumer%20confidence%20suffered%20its,worse%20than%20the%20data%20indicated. https://www.businessinsider.com/consumers-pessimistic-on-eco... 2025 - "a recession in 2025": https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/2025-stock-market-investment-outlooks-wall-street-prediction-roundup-sp500-2024-12#bca-research-bearish-s-and-p-500-target-of-4-452-1 https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/2025-stock-m... people just so desperately want the USA to be in a recession it seems.

awesome_dude 8mo ago
I don't think it's a /want/ per se - it's more of an overriding sense that that is where the economy is heading, or is, under the current set of economic policies. Nobody would care for a millisecond about the doomsayers if there wasn't some dread in their lives about what's happening.
vld_chk 8mo ago
to be fair, it implies nothing about current state of the US economy and likelihood of recession now. Induction conclusion is not the one which suits the case.
monero-xmr 8mo ago
[dead]
SlinkyOnStairs 8mo ago
> people just so desperately want the USA to be in a recession it seems. You've got it the wrong way around. People are desperate to explain why their experience of the economy; Which for most people is "not good", doesn't match the formal economic metrics and definitions of a "recession". Constant layoffs, horrible job market, even worse housing market, and the lingering inflation. The other half of this is of course, the bubble. Everyone knows AI is a bubble. Everyone knows that sometime soon, Nvidia & friends are going to come crashing down. AI may be the future, but people don't have the trillions of dollars burning holes in their pockets to justify these valuations. Even AI execs are openly admitting there's a bubble. So there's heightened interest in the economy minus AI; What are things going to look like without the bubble? How much is AI hype propping up the economic indicators, if not the economy as a whole? The alarm being that the answers are "bad" and "a lot" respectively. While direct AI investment spending has a limited effect, so much of the US' spending is driven by those whose money is from assets (the rich and the retired), that the stock market's soaring has an outsized impact. And when the bubble bursts, the stock market crashes, and that spending vanishes.
- reactordev 8mo ago
  I go to bed dreaming of putting money in a 401k again…
- ddxv 8mo ago
  I upvoted the parent, read your comment, unvoted and upvoted yours. I think what you're saying describes how I feel exactly.
- YinglingHeavy 8mo ago
  Less: "its a bubble" More: "labor market and consumer spending is less meaningful than ever before" The masses are unable to truly internalize the latter.
  - AngryData 8mo ago
    Less meaningful, or less represented? If you sell your foundation out beneath yourself, the entire structure might come down. No matter how valuable it is to sell that rebar out of the concrete now, or how many additions that money allows you to add on top, it is likely not a sound strategy long term.
  - ludicrousdispla 8mo ago
    I recently learned that in the US there are now more private equity/VC funds than there are McDonald's locations, which may indicate that the majority of consumer spending is irrelevant to the top 'n'% https://www.thedailyupside.com/advisor/investing-strategies/there-are-now-more-pe-funds-than-mcdonalds-franchises-whats-behind-the-alts-explosion/ https://www.thedailyupside.com/advisor/investing-strategies/...
  - SlinkyOnStairs 8mo ago
    Those are two separate things that reinforce eachother. Having high amount of spending come from the asset wealth is by itself not immediately a problem. Having a bubble is by itself not immediately a problem. It's the combination of the two that's dangerous.
- Auracle 8mo ago
jmward01 8mo ago
Our public discourse is focused mainly on 'things are terrible because of the other person'. MAGA shows this since it is predicated purely on this concept. You can only make something great again if it isn't great now. The challenge is that yelling it just to make the other person look bad hides when it actually happens and makes avoiding it hard since you are taking the wrong actions at the wrong time. Even if we are in a recession, we need to start fostering looking towards the future. Not just trying to 'fix' things, but actually looking towards doing new big things. As John Green might say, there are two basic ways you can make the world better. You can decrease the suck or increase the awesome. I take this to imply that if you only decrease the suck then you can never be better than you were. It may be necessary but you also need to increase the awesome to keep growing and America hasn't been focused on the awesome for a while now. Let's increase the awesome even if there is suck still around.
AngryData 8mo ago
Or maybe it is in one, but neither the government nor wallstreet wants to admit it because it will kill their investment markets, kill political careers, and cause large shifts in voting patterns which threatens established parties and companies. When even big tech companies are starting to say it, the highest margin businesses with the highest paid workers, how do you imagine most other industries are and have been feeling?
- joe_mamba 8mo ago
  Yeah I dislike this disingenuous and out of touch argument that "we're not in a recession because this random graph found is going up". More people can struggle to pay bills even if the DOW and S&P is up. Most people don't judge the economic situation based on graphs the TV shows them, they judge it based on how much month they have left at the end of the pay cheque and how easy can they get a new decent job when they get laid off. The economy != the stock market. I wish HN would get that, but since a lot of people here are asset millionaires, they're way too out of touch.
rich_sasha 8mo ago
I find the "K-shaped" recovery a very compelling narrative. Some companies are going stratospheric, some are decaying, the average is +1% growth or so. So depending on where you are, you will see the economy as either booming or floundering. There's plenty of little nuggets like this to point to. US 2025 GDP ex AI investment was in a recession. US equity market ex tech does not outperform e.g. Europe. And so on.
- tonyedgecombe 8mo ago
  I'm not sure that means much. Absent AI investors would have put their money somewhere else.
  - rich_sasha 8mo ago
    Depends where the money came from. If it's debt / optimistic raises based on great faith in AI, not necessarily. But agreed overall. The tech one is more compelling. The US equity market dominance has been driven by it's very successful tech business. Everything else is perhaps in a similar malaise to eg Europe.
  - scoofy 8mo ago
    Imagine a consumer packaged goods fund that focuses on premium consumer packaged goods, like the kind of more cutesy stuff you may have seen on the shelves at places like Whole Foods. You would think that the fund is doing poorly because people have less money to spend in general. However, in a K-shaped recovery, the premium goods should actually over-perform the standard options, because the people who are on tight budgets and moving to the value options, well, they weren't really buying the premium items in the first place. Markets have an obscene number of variables to consider in any analysis. An industry can be doing both good and bad depending on what the product is, and who the customer is. At the end of the day, I continue to believe the Housing Theory of Everything thesis when it comes to the sense that people are on an economic treadmill where nothing ever gets better. And it helps describe the engine behind the K-shaped recovery. If we can fix the rent-seeking, we should be able to get back to a world where a rising tide lifts all boats. https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-everything/ https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-every...
duxup 8mo ago
I think more so people saw past cycles as relatively predictable and sever since the mortgage crisis they are looking for bits of that expectation. Also ... doom and gloom gets more views.
thrance 8mo ago
At any given time, there are enough economists fearing a recession to write an article about it. Doesn't mean they're always wrong though, recessions do happen.

awesome_dude 8mo ago

I don't think it's a /want/ per se - it's more of an overriding sense that that is where the economy is heading, or is, under the current set of economic policies. Nobody would care for a millisecond about the doomsayers if there wasn't some dread in their lives about what's happening.

vld_chk 8mo ago

to be fair, it implies nothing about current state of the US economy and likelihood of recession now. Induction conclusion is not the one which suits the case.

monero-xmr 8mo ago

[dead]

SlinkyOnStairs 8mo ago

> people just so desperately want the USA to be in a recession it seems. You've got it the wrong way around. People are desperate to explain why their experience of the economy; Which for most people is "not good", doesn't match the formal economic metrics and definitions of a "recession". Constant layoffs, horrible job market, even worse housing market, and the lingering inflation. The other half of this is of course, the bubble. Everyone knows AI is a bubble. Everyone knows that sometime soon, Nvidia & friends are going to come crashing down. AI may be the future, but people don't have the trillions of dollars burning holes in their pockets to justify these valuations. Even AI execs are openly admitting there's a bubble. So there's heightened interest in the economy minus AI; What are things going to look like without the bubble? How much is AI hype propping up the economic indicators, if not the economy as a whole? The alarm being that the answers are "bad" and "a lot" respectively. While direct AI investment spending has a limited effect, so much of the US' spending is driven by those whose money is from assets (the rich and the retired), that the stock market's soaring has an outsized impact. And when the bubble bursts, the stock market crashes, and that spending vanishes.

reactordev 8mo ago
I go to bed dreaming of putting money in a 401k again…
ddxv 8mo ago
I upvoted the parent, read your comment, unvoted and upvoted yours. I think what you're saying describes how I feel exactly.
YinglingHeavy 8mo ago
Less: "its a bubble" More: "labor market and consumer spending is less meaningful than ever before" The masses are unable to truly internalize the latter.
- AngryData 8mo ago
  Less meaningful, or less represented? If you sell your foundation out beneath yourself, the entire structure might come down. No matter how valuable it is to sell that rebar out of the concrete now, or how many additions that money allows you to add on top, it is likely not a sound strategy long term.
- ludicrousdispla 8mo ago
  I recently learned that in the US there are now more private equity/VC funds than there are McDonald's locations, which may indicate that the majority of consumer spending is irrelevant to the top 'n'% https://www.thedailyupside.com/advisor/investing-strategies/there-are-now-more-pe-funds-than-mcdonalds-franchises-whats-behind-the-alts-explosion/ https://www.thedailyupside.com/advisor/investing-strategies/...
- SlinkyOnStairs 8mo ago
  Those are two separate things that reinforce eachother. Having high amount of spending come from the asset wealth is by itself not immediately a problem. Having a bubble is by itself not immediately a problem. It's the combination of the two that's dangerous.
Auracle 8mo ago

jmward01 8mo ago

Our public discourse is focused mainly on 'things are terrible because of the other person'. MAGA shows this since it is predicated purely on this concept. You can only make something great again if it isn't great now. The challenge is that yelling it just to make the other person look bad hides when it actually happens and makes avoiding it hard since you are taking the wrong actions at the wrong time. Even if we are in a recession, we need to start fostering looking towards the future. Not just trying to 'fix' things, but actually looking towards doing new big things. As John Green might say, there are two basic ways you can make the world better. You can decrease the suck or increase the awesome. I take this to imply that if you only decrease the suck then you can never be better than you were. It may be necessary but you also need to increase the awesome to keep growing and America hasn't been focused on the awesome for a while now. Let's increase the awesome even if there is suck still around.

AngryData 8mo ago

Or maybe it is in one, but neither the government nor wallstreet wants to admit it because it will kill their investment markets, kill political careers, and cause large shifts in voting patterns which threatens established parties and companies. When even big tech companies are starting to say it, the highest margin businesses with the highest paid workers, how do you imagine most other industries are and have been feeling?

joe_mamba 8mo ago
Yeah I dislike this disingenuous and out of touch argument that "we're not in a recession because this random graph found is going up". More people can struggle to pay bills even if the DOW and S&P is up. Most people don't judge the economic situation based on graphs the TV shows them, they judge it based on how much month they have left at the end of the pay cheque and how easy can they get a new decent job when they get laid off. The economy != the stock market. I wish HN would get that, but since a lot of people here are asset millionaires, they're way too out of touch.

rich_sasha 8mo ago

I find the "K-shaped" recovery a very compelling narrative. Some companies are going stratospheric, some are decaying, the average is +1% growth or so. So depending on where you are, you will see the economy as either booming or floundering. There's plenty of little nuggets like this to point to. US 2025 GDP ex AI investment was in a recession. US equity market ex tech does not outperform e.g. Europe. And so on.

tonyedgecombe 8mo ago
I'm not sure that means much. Absent AI investors would have put their money somewhere else.
- rich_sasha 8mo ago
  Depends where the money came from. If it's debt / optimistic raises based on great faith in AI, not necessarily. But agreed overall. The tech one is more compelling. The US equity market dominance has been driven by it's very successful tech business. Everything else is perhaps in a similar malaise to eg Europe.
- scoofy 8mo ago
  Imagine a consumer packaged goods fund that focuses on premium consumer packaged goods, like the kind of more cutesy stuff you may have seen on the shelves at places like Whole Foods. You would think that the fund is doing poorly because people have less money to spend in general. However, in a K-shaped recovery, the premium goods should actually over-perform the standard options, because the people who are on tight budgets and moving to the value options, well, they weren't really buying the premium items in the first place. Markets have an obscene number of variables to consider in any analysis. An industry can be doing both good and bad depending on what the product is, and who the customer is. At the end of the day, I continue to believe the Housing Theory of Everything thesis when it comes to the sense that people are on an economic treadmill where nothing ever gets better. And it helps describe the engine behind the K-shaped recovery. If we can fix the rent-seeking, we should be able to get back to a world where a rising tide lifts all boats. https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-everything/ https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-every...

duxup 8mo ago

I think more so people saw past cycles as relatively predictable and sever since the mortgage crisis they are looking for bits of that expectation. Also ... doom and gloom gets more views.

thrance 8mo ago

At any given time, there are enough economists fearing a recession to write an article about it. Doesn't mean they're always wrong though, recessions do happen.