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Comment by twoquestions | Hacker News Reader

People have been screaming about a recession for the last year now, with not a whole lot of hard data to back it up. Inflation aside, the US is doing well, and even on that metric we're doing better than most of Europe right now. Stories of doom grab eyeballs, and a bunch of people really want the US/Europe to have a bad time, so there's also a lot of wishcasting going on.

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The U.S. and especially the dollar are doing better than pretty much everyone right now… but haven’t we been told for years that we are now part of a globalized economy? If the EU, Japan, and China all fall into recessions at the same time won’t they take the US down with them?

It's super complicated because part of the reason the other economies are having issues is because of the US dollar strength. Obviously the impact of a strong US dollar from inside the US is different because it makes importing cheaper and exporting harder but does affect domestic consumption.

There are hundreds(thousands) of physical supply chains that are each different and which will react differently. The financial supply chains are incomprehensibly convoluted.

In short the economies will influence each other but no one knows when or how the US will be affected.

Bear in mind that tech can decouple from other industries. It's possible you have a recession, say, in Banking while Fintech is growing like crazy (because it has a much smaller starting base).

People have been screaming about a recession for the last year now, with not a whole lot of hard data to back it up.

Other than 2 quarters of negative GDP growth - which was the common understanding until it became politically inconvenient.

In which case the recession is over, since we just finished a quarter of positive GDP growth.

Or maybe one metric is insufficient to judge an entire economy.

Perhaps a little overstated. In the past, -0.1% growth was considered flat. We only got the “-0.1% is the same as -9%, technically speaking” arguments when they became politically convenient.

If US growth had rebounded from -0.1% to +0.1%, I suspect partisan hacks’ positions would instantly reverse and we’d have republicans telling us that a tenth a percent is not really growth, and democrats yelling that technically it’s no different than +9% so there’s no recession.

I'd reserve judgement until they're done raising interest rates. These things take time to propagate throughout the economy.

And if one thing’s clear, it’s that even if we aren’t in a recession now, they will absolutely keep raising rates until we are.

Unlike the 2008 recession that was a result is mismanagement in the financial sector, this recession is very much an intentional act of monetary policy.

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