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Comment by jartelt | Hacker News Reader

What? Your hurricane example is not the same at all. No one is saying that predictions of a recession in the media are the cause of the recession.

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.

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> No one is saying that predictions of a recession in the media are the cause of the recession.

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.

It would only be notable if pundits can accurately predict if there will be a recession in the next year. I doubt they can because these things are difficult/impossible to predict (otherwise no one would have lost money in the Great Recession in 2008).

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.

None of that is correct, though. Plenty of people in 2007 were complaining about overheated real estate markets (though no one outside the banking industry knew the disastrous leverage that was in flight). Plenty of people in 1999 (even the Fed chariman! Remember "irrational exuberance"?) could see that the dot com boom was unsustainable. In both situations wehre were predictions of downturns everywhere in the media, and they were right.

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.

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