My savings (including 401k) have gone down 24% since a year ago. Dinner at a restaurant / UberEats costs 30% - 50% more than a year ago. What else must happen to call it what it is?
Generally though we are looking for a couple month period of time in declining employment, GDP, etc...overall health of the economy.
> The committee places particular emphasis on two monthly measures of activity across the entire economy: (1) personal income less transfer payments, in real terms and (2) employment. In addition, we refer to two indicators with coverage primarily of manufacturing and goods: (3) industrial production and (4) the volume of sales of the manufacturing and wholesale-retail sectors adjusted for price changes. We also look at monthly estimates of real GDP such as those prepared by Macroeconomic Advisers (see http://www.macroadvisers.com). Although these indicators are the most important measures considered by the NBER in developing its business cycle chronology, there is no fixed rule about which other measures contribute information to the process.
Stock market valuations and cost of eating out don’t factor into it.
In technical terms, it’s strictly referring to the amount of production that is taking place in the economy, it has to be reducing.
Your stock portfolio going down isn’t a recession, pricing for specific foods/services increasing isn’t a recession.
If all your assets are equities, you might not feel like you are doing that well. If your assets are in real estate, you are probably richer than you've ever been.
Are you exaggerating or were you just extremely careless in your investments? S&P500 is down 1.4% and Nasdaq is down 11.0% since June 2nd, 2021.
Most of my savings are in index funds, specifically FNCMX and FFIDX. I know in very real terms the value of my savings is down 23.57% compared with November 23rd 2021.
If your 401k correlates much with the S&P 500 to some degree, can't you comfort yourself and get some additional perspective just by looking a few years back, rather than one?
https://seekingalpha.com/news/3845238-pace-of-job-growth-exp...
There is no way in hell that we're currently in a recession with that kind of job growth and low unemployment.
since these indicators are always published after a time period has occurred and been tabulated, its possible we have crossed the threshold and are in a recession as we speak.
Q1 2022 is estimated at -1.5% right now, the final number will be released on 6/29. Meaning Q2 final data will be released sometime around the end of September, to make it an "official" recession (if Q2 ends up being negative).
Unfortunately, unless you a a politician or a professional economist, your opinion will lose value even faster than your salary. .