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Comment by bryanlarsen | Hacker News Reader

Are you in Europe or the States? The two areas have vastly different economic outlooks.

The outlook in the US can best be described as "uncertain". Valuations are down because the market doesn't like uncertainty, but it doesn't necessarily translate into a future recession -- many of the economic indicators in the US are very positive.

OTOH, Europe is facing a hard winter unless an energy miracle appears.

The market is down 20% on the year, so that means that a lot of people are underwater on their options, so that the fact that yours still has some value means that you are doing better than many.

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What are you referring to as being positive? .i.e. nonfarm payroll growth is not good at this point.

Huh? nonfarm payroll growth is up 263,000 in September.

The most predictive indicator is the unemployment ratio, and it's very low right now.

Perhaps inflation is a better predictive indicator, but we really don't know since we haven't had any for ~40 years. As I said, it's the uncertainty depressing markets IMO, not necessarily the outlook.

Unemployment really needs to be paired with the Labor Force Participation Rate. Unemployment is low, but LFPR is down as well. 10 years ago it hovered steadily around 63.5-64%. The pandemic crushed it, but we're still only back up to around 62.5%.

That's a lot of people not working that simply aren't in the market anymore, unemployment would look a lot worse if they were included.

LFPR is above the level it was pre-pandemic. Immigration is the best way of driving up the LFPR, but that was essentially nil during the pandemic and is still way down. Combine that with the aging population, and a slight increase in LFPR over the last 3 years is much better than could be expected.

Sorry, missed this reply! Here's my source for the LFPR stats I mentioned above, we haven't recovered from early 2020 yet (and are way off from the rates pre-housing crash)

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART

because those are the only 2 places in the world people could possibly be

At no point did the parent allude that. Perhaps the poster just doesn't have insight into every economy on the planet and didn't want to give nonfactual info.

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