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Comment by hammock | Hacker News Reader

What recession? We are not in a recession. Unemployment data and the broader economy are still strong. Saying otherwise is dangerous, to be honest

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Agree we're not in a recession, but I'm not sure I'd say we're in a strong place. The impression I've got from the articles I've read is that no one knows what the fuck is going on. Some indicators look great (like unemployment), but others look bad (like inflation).

Low employment combined with high inflation is forcing the fed to raise interest rates to induce lower demand with the side affect being higher unemployment. This is how they killed inflation in the 80's. They are trying to thread the needle of inflation and recession. The likely outcome is eventually a recession.

Conversely, the government could raise taxes across the board to control demand and trickle that money back to individuals over time, but it is political suicide.

Keep in mind when the fed talks about lower demand, that includes lower labor demand. They are likely to be forced to push demand to recession levels if they want it to match supply across the board. More lockdowns in China is certainly not helping on the supply side, and the latest jobs report showed the labor market not loosening.

We are certainly in something but what it is hasn't had a word assigned to it yet. Maybe it's stagflation, maybe it's swagflation, I dunno.

Every downturn is like all the others and every downturn is a unique snowflake.

Tech or SAAS has definitely had a major correction/downturn. This is not evident in the unemployment data because it is such a small contingent vs the US population

It might be overdue. Tech came out of the 2008 recession pretty well in the mean (of course some people suffered badly). A lot of companies came out of it saying to cut costs they had to invest big in their technology.

dangerous? come on man get a grip

The definition of a recession is two consecutive quarters of negative growth, which we've had.

We're waking up from a a long night of heavy drinking (free money via zero interest rate, unrestrained QE, etc.), the bill is due and you're plugging your ears and yelling that the party must go on.

Yeah, that sounds like MAGA speech. Aka the greatest threat to our democracy right now

But we had growth last quarter now, right?

Preliminary report. It will get revised.

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