Parts of America may already be facing recession
economist.com
economist.com
I recommend taking a look at this jobs chart:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/USPRIV
Then set the time range to be 1997 to present.
What’s remarkable is that the slope of the curve is essentially bimodal. Either the economy is hiring at 200k/month, or it is firing at 200k/month.
The 2008 recession was remarkably bad. We set back jobs growth more than a decade, which had never happened before. Since then we’ve had the longest stretch of time where the economy is in “hiring mode” in history. But there was also no “snap back”, the curve has been going up, but it’s still shifted 10 years to the left.
It’s not clear this stretch of up time has ended yet, but the market is flashing signals that it is more likely to end in the next 6 months than it was a year ago.
With inflation so low, this to me implies there is still slack capacity and we have room to keep the “hiring” mode turned on for a while longer, but the Fed would have to lower rates for that to happen.
Former Fed President Dudley’s comments in his op-ed last week were a shockingly bad look for the Fed. [1] Advocating for intentionally tanking the economy to make the current President look bad undermines the entire Fed governance model.
[1] - https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/28/the-feds-efforts-to-stay-out...
[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/21/business/economy/jobs-gro...
Maybe the Fed should be audited to see what other shenanigans they've done in the past that wasn't true to their directives.
But more importantly, the people who care about unemployment at any given time are the marginal people being sacked or hired. For a one-stat picture I'd guess that real income quintiles across the entire population would be the best for a general economic health check. The data you picked leaves open the question of "are those jobs overpaid software engineers or fruit pickers?"
> With inflation so low
The price of gold currently implies inflation of ~8% p.a. since 2005 (14,000/kg to 38,500/kg over 13 years) vs CPI inflation in the range of 2% p.a. and I promise you that in real terms gold isn't any more useful today than it was then. Inflation isn't low, consumer price inflation is low. Inflation is contained in the asset markets and at a guess consumer inflation can't rise because it is linked to wages rather than asset prices.
Looking at the chart. have we been experiencing deflation since 2011?
But I don't believe the long-term real price of gold is rising and it certainly does not offer a financial yield in real terms. Explaining today's prices vs the ~$500 base after the 1980s bubble is much easier if we assume that inflation is about equal to the amount of money in the system (aka the M2) instead of the CPI.
I'd bet (as in, I'm basing my financial planning decisions) that the next time gold spikes up in price it will imply inflation from 2011 has been higher than 2% too. My money is on the price of gold tracking closer to the M2 monetary supply than CPI inflation over the long term.
Combine that with fairly stagnant wage growth, and the linked chart doesn’t really look impressive.
So either you need job growth to outpace workforce growth, or you need to eliminate workers (e.g. less immigration, lower retirement age, shorter work week / lower overtime thresholds).
The job growth is impressive - at least, it’s the best job growth we’ve ever had in one run. It would be nice if it could keep running for another 24 months at least.
The mentality of a market slowing down being a depression or a recession is odd to me. The market slowing down leading to a depression, isn't as odd, because it can be at times a precursor. While that may be the case here, it is also entirely possible the market is simply normalizing from previous volatile times.
>A recession is a macroeconomic term that refers to a significant decline in general economic activity in a designated region. It is typically recognized after two consecutive quarters of economic decline, as reflected by GDP in conjunction with monthly indicators like employment. Recessions are officially declared in the U.S. by a committee of experts at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), who determines the peak and subsequent trough of the business cycle which demonstrates the recession.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/recession.asp
To dive in deeper: I don't have a proper definition of "economic decline" but as far as I am aware it means, not a slowing economy, but a dropping economy. eg, the market going down, or unemployment rising.
Also, it makes sense Germany is slowing. Germany's economy is strongly based on higher end exports, but with the drama with Brexit, and US tariffs, Germany is going to be mildly hit, but in the long run, asia has slowly been exporting higher end products. Anecdotal but, 5 years ago I'd buy German made speakers, but today the same companies are manufacturing them in China. Germany is trying to transition to white collar and has been for a few years now, trying to offer good incentives for software engineers to move to Germany.
A riskless return above inflation is infinitely valuable, because you can create unlimited amounts of new money by taking out loans in order to exploit it. So, unless someone is out there making infinite money, nobody is sure about the pending recession.
My opinion is somewhere in this direction: there are some publications that are targeted at professionals that won't play the hysteria-game, because professionals don't need entertainment, they want information to base business decisions on. For the general public, "the news" doesn't really matter for most of their decisions ("Hong Kong is heating up ... how does this affect my dinner plans for Thursday?"), so they primarily get entertainment from the news, and when the companies give them what they want, you get what we have.
Who's suggesting that?
It might also be that the media starts talking recession after picking up some real world data that is predictive of recessions.
I understood the parent comment to imply they shouldn't talk about recession because it would increase the likelihood of recession.
What you suggest sounds plausible. Most journalists aren't revealing anything, they are just echoing developing trends to a wider audience. If journalists are talking about recession more, other people are probably talking about recession more to journalists.
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 )
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?
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.
I don't have a study to point you to. I would just be doing what you too can do, first try googling for one. Just because a study, peer reviewed, professional, yada yada yada doesn't exist, does not mean it not a real phenomena. (Please don't read this last bit as snark or personally... it's for the few that completely dismiss ideas or things unless some study supports it). A study would be nice. Who's going to conduct it? Who's going to peer review it? How will we identify any conflicts of interest? Regardless, I'd love to have this more formally researched and studied.
How does it “protect” my rights when I would be forced to join a union and pay dues just to get a job? That’s ridiculous. Perhaps people should be forced to join a church? Just as crazy right?
I should not have to join or pay an organization in order to get a job. That’s extortion. Unions aren’t banned in right to work states — workers just have the freedom to decide if they want to join those organizations. How is freedom of choice a bad thing? You would force people into unions? Isn’t that totalitarianism?
Why would I want my wages collectively bargained anyway? I am far above average in my particular field, why would I want to be paid at the average? The only workers unions benefit are the below average workers. They necessarily harm the top to “help” the bottom. Aren’t unions the ones that created rubber rooms? Aren’t they the reason it costs so much to get any public infrastructure built in union states?
Join a union if you want. That’s what is great about America, there is still (barely) a thing called freedom. However it’s fading fast with socialist/communist/leftist/totalitarian ideology catching on among people that are too young to remember Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in the 1970s or who ignore Venezuela now or are under the impression that Sweden is a socialist success story. [1]
[1] https://reason.com/video/stossel-sweden-not-a-socialist-succ...
It sets a regional wage for a category of work that makes up the baseline pay for all other workers in that category in that region, you included.
Without it, wages become a race to the bottom with companies all attempting to compete with each other on hiring workers for the lowest cost rather than the highest dependability.
That said, these are cycles as always.
The numbers look good in an aggregate sense, but most individuals have less power than before.
I don’t need a person at a hotel front desk to check me in, I don’t need a taxi dispatcher to call me a car, and I don’t need secretaries to handle my scheduling. Automated reports remove the need for many middle management positions, and it all manifests itself as stagnant wages for warehouse type work which isn’t yet automated.
Imagine Google's customer service, but everywhere. No thanks.
Automation shouldn't be replacing people in the workforce, it should be allowing us to do our jobs more efficiently and tackle the more pressing, human issues that require nuance.
Personally, I like all the new automated services, and I would say the benefits have outweighed the issues. The gaps in the system don’t require as many people as before to fill, or perhaps the ones that are required don’t need to be as highly trained so they offer lower pay.
For example, Home Depot and Lowe’s websites now show you exactly where an item is in the store, which is very helpful to a shopper. But that may also cause some employees to be made redundant as they theoretically have more time to assist with other things assuming they are helping fewer customers find things. This one change might not affect the numbers, but combined with online ordering, in store pickup, self checkout machines, it might all add up to a few less positions at the store.
Self checkout at the grocery store is still a mess that requires frequent intervention from on-hand employees, and even the most advanced system still usually requires someone there for insurance. Hell, the best minds in the country still can't get cars to drive themselves without someone on deck to pull the plug if it all goes tits up.
Automation is nice, but it's not smart enough. Not yet at least.
For everyone else, this economy has been a nightmarish hellscape.
I'm curious to see if the number of WARN notices being issued by state, and the number of positions impacted in each notice, is different / higher than it has been in previous years. That's what is missing from this article: how do these layoffs compare against prior years?
[1]: https://www.michigan.gov/wda/0,5303,7-304-64178_64179---,00....