The dip "out" of recession interest in mid 2008 is interesting. Also interesting that you can spot 2011, when "double dip recession" came into popularity as a buzz-phrase. (see for example at the time: https://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/08/business/economy/american...)
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/T10Y2Y
The smart money has been getting out of the market for some time. But you can't sell unless someone else wants to buy. So at the end of the business cycle there is usually a blizzard of "the economy will keep doing good" articles contrary to common sense, trying to get the rubes to buy so the smart money can bail, await the crash, and then buy the stock back at pennies on the dollar.
[1] Check the stock market or some other favorite grown metric. Things hit a peak level about a year ago and have been mostly flat ever since. This is what the peak of a growth cycle looks like; every one can see that.
The counterfactual I provided is just an obvious example of the fallacy. The real meat of the argument was in that post too -- it's far more likely (Occam and all) that people are predicting recessions because every dummy can see that a recession is likely following the end of an expansion than that there is some kind of magical effect on public thinking.
This is just politics. You don't want your favored entity to get blamed for a recession, so you find a way to make that recession the "fault" of your political enemies. But no, growth cycles are cycles for a reason, and we don't need "fault" to describe what happens.
Another example are quack cures: unusual cures are tried when people are at their sickest, then people improve, and they credit the improvement to the cure. Almost everybody who is very sick gets better, though, and the rest are too dead to denounce the cure as fake.
Contrary to your assertion, I don’t necessarily see a clear signal in the stock market (which only loosely correlates with the economy) or other economic indicators. Job growth is still somewhat strong, for example. And many a temporary flattening of indicators have given way to another run.
Of course as day follows night, recession has followed expansion. But the cycle just isn’t as regular as the 24h day, or the 12 months that make a year.
Just as we have become better at predicting the weather or the path of hurricanes, economists have become better, but not perfect, at predicting, and even softening the blow of, recessions.
OP was merely asking if news archives could be used for a sort of crowdsourced signal, a valid and interesting question. Google trends might also be interesting to look at, although I haven’t heard much of their flu prognosis in recent years.
The OP is just asking if there is a way to predict the likelihood of a recession by using media reports. The answer could very well be no, but it is nothing like saying that google searches for hurricanes cause storms.
The correct analogy is that it would be like searching for media reports of incoming hurricanes in order to tell if there was a hurricane coming. I imagine that method would work well for telling if a hurricane is coming (though it would be more straight forward to just look at the weather report)!
I have a feeling this method wouldn't work well for predicting a recession though.
That was the clear implication I took from the phrasing. And it seems to be confirmed by a bunch of other posters here.
Again I ask: everyone can see that we're at the peak of a growth cycle, why is it notable or surprising that pundits are predicting that we'll hit the downward slow soon? It seems it's only notable if you're trying to blame the recession on the pundits.
You say it is obvious that we are at a peak of a growth cycle. Maybe you are right, but you also could very well be wrong... People have been saying we are at a peak for several years now.
My point was mainly that your analogy was a stretch.
Likewise lots of people were predicting a few years solid growth starting in 2009. And they were right too!
And all I'm saying is that it's more likely that they were right because economic cycles are broadly predictable on the multi-year scales and not because Paul Krugman has some kind of magical power to produce a recession just by talking about it.
2. The "cause" of 2008 was not media reports, but years of actual bad behavior by banks. Now if you want to rewrite history, awesome, but be transparent about it.
As in, there's a correlation between heatwaves and A/C use. You could hypothesise that A/C cause heatwaves, but the simpler and fairly obvious explanations is that people use their A/C more during heatwaves.