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Comment by matt3210 | Hacker News Reader

> Growth in the US has already contracted for two quarters in a row, a milestone that in many countries - though not the US - is considered a recession.

this again :lol:

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It isn't a recession unless it is from the recesso region of France, otherwise it is just a sparkling downturn.

all recessions are inevitable. It's a feature of the business cycle for a trough-shaped period of time to occur.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_cycle

Ray Dalio does a great video on it too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHe0bXAIuk0

really interesting! thank you for sharing.

Their severity can be lessened however by not printing utterly outrageous amounts of money in the upturns.

Any other Chief executive and they would be getting roasted and hit in the news with Recession news and articles. But the current one for some reason, has less stickiness than "the Teflon Don."

Imagine Bush (shudder) or Clinton or Obama or Trump not getting roasted with Recessionary news... They all would have been at the receiving end of the bad news.

At least with Clinton the budget was balanced and even ran at a surplus.

Thanks to Newt Gingrich.

I was enraged when all hope of paying off the debt was cut off at its knees by the Bush tax cuts.

He was truly our worst president, despite Obama claiming they're friends --what a sell-out.

The "Clinton surplus" was an accounting gimmick where money stored in various government "trust funds" was loaned to the Treasury in exchange for Treasuries, but was counted as normal revenue. If "intragovernmental debt" were properly accounted for, Clinton never had a surplus (indeed, the national debt increased every year of his presidency, just like his predecessors and successors).

No reason to want that in the absence of inflation. A country is not a household and a budget surplus is the same thing as the money supply getting smaller, which is bad business if the number of people in the world who want to use your currency is increasing.

He's not in trouble for causing a recession cause he hasn't. The statement in the article is debatable even if you want to use a technical definition.

Real GDI, which is supposed to be the same thing as real GDP, hasn't decreased: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A261RX1Q020SBEA

Which suggests dips in GDP are actually due to measuring it incorrectly since the economy is so unusual right now.

Also, people dislike inflation more than they dislike the unemployment rate going up a little. That's because inflation hits everyone, while unemployment only applies to a few people. That's more or less why the Fed is trying to cause a minor recession in 2023.

He "hasn't" only because they (many economists and reporters) abandoned the de facto/practical definition which had been used in previous Recessions in favor of a more strict definition to define it away, or rather postpone the inevitable.

In previous recessions they’d be reporting about mass job losses, but instead we have the lowest unemployment in 50 years.

They have been reporting about high gas prices, which people care a lot more about than GDP/GDI.

Biden hasn't done anything to cause a recession. His party has done the opposite, if anything (although that's complicated and debatable).

The Fed, on the other hand, is trying to move toward recession, or at least lower employment, by raising interest rates. They see low inflation as being preferable to high employment and rising prices.

There is no good outcome when global supply chains and investors have been shocked by a pandemic and then a major land war.

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