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 )
https://www.thebalance.com/the-great-recession-of-2008-expla...
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.
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.
A number of leading voices, across the spectrum, did predict that.
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.
Bring on the gloom and doom, it's not much different than what we had from 2014 onwards.
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.
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.
Bear in mind we live in a world where this happened: 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?
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.
Sure, and you don't think journalists have developed a culture around this fact?
They're not dumber than people on HN because they don't use machine learning models. They've developed practises to avoid being manipulated.
And yes, those practises do fail or break down sometimes, or PR flaks find new ways to sneak their agendas in, sure, and this is why you should read news from multiple independent sources.
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?