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Comment by code4life | Hacker News Reader

It really feels like we are in the middle of a recession.

Worse, we’ve been in one but have been pretending we aren’t. Stock goes up.

Line goes up or it gets the stonks again

The biggest "pretend" is where spokesmen, spin doctors, and sycophants for the plutocrat class have somehow convinced the 99% that stocks going up makes more jobs for the little people.

are stocks even going up outside of tech stocks that can benefit from AI investment? everything else seems stagnant

No. And even in tech, its highly concentrated in AI.

The S&P 500 is almost 10% Nvidia. Just Nvidia. Y'all that's scary.

The Nifty Fifty concept from the 70s sound almost sensible compared to the bullshit of Magnificent Seven of now.

The same cycle just goes around and around...

It’s broken. They did this and think it’s ok, it’s not. It’s most definitely not.

SP500 is flat this year when you account for loss of purchasing power of the US dollar:

https://ycharts.com/indices/%5ESPXEUR

Factor out the AI companies doing circular dealing to juke their stock price and GDP growth was like 0.1% combine that with purchasing power loss and US economy is net negative.

It's pretty clear what happens next.

Over 42 million people are about to lose their SNAP payments in 4 days[1] and millions more medical care.

It's gonna get bad.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4g7d9j7p5qo

"Exclude data I don't like, combing it with other data that's unrelated in unknown ways, and voila: DOOM!"

The only publicly traded companies that are involved in what could be considered circular dealings in enough volume to affect their stock price are Nvidia and Oracle.

So, the company that, by itself, is 10% of the S&P 500.

I never would have bet on an Nvidia crash alone being what causes the 21st century great depression, but reality is alwways stranger than fiction.

No it's not:

https://ycharts.com/indices/%5ESPXCAD

https://ycharts.com/indices/%5ESPXJPY

https://ycharts.com/indices/%5ESPXCNY

Hmm, might have you cherry-picked some data?

>when you account for loss of purchasing power of the US dollar:

I see about a 10% growth in your charts and that's what experts estimate the loss on the dolar has been this year. What's the deal?

The "deal" is that those chats are already adjusted to foreign currencies. That's 10% growth in those currencies.

Maybe your experts aren't such experts.

Why are we pretending that other currencies also aren't falling? Those charts don't negate that suggestion.

I'm no expert myself, but feel free to argue with them if you are:

https://www.morganstanley.com/insights/articles/us-dollar-de...

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/us/d... (note: This one comes from Paul Graham himself).

The most pernicious part of the con is that by systematically dismantling pensions and forcing everyone into 401(k)s, they've ensured that we all have to root for the plutocrats. We're forced to watch our retirement funds, which means we're incentivized to hope Amazon's stock does go up after firing 14k (or 30k according to other sources) people.

It's a system of forced complicity. We have to root for the billionaires, or we risk our own survival in old age.

Our survival in old age is guaranteed to be a shit show no matter your wealth. Social security won’t be there. Medicare won’t be there. Your one room apartment in your assisted living place will run you $15,000/mo. And still, no one gets out alive.

Depends on how close you are to retirement.

I'm not even halfway there. I'd rather think long term and legitimately fix issues in the economy. I don't need number to go up explosively every year.

If not for the top 10 of the S&P 500 - the companies that can get a meeting at the white house - we'd probably be in a recession and S&P would be down.

It's almost like a merger of Capital and State.

It has been and it is. Both US and China have successfully created a Leviathan albeit if different form. EU is way behind and that’s why it’s losing.

The EU did it too, probably second with the US being last. It’s just that the EU focused on worker’s rights, protections for origins of products (can’t call bubbly wine Champaign if it’s not from there), etc.

To compete with other Leviathan unfortunately you have to become one too. It’s just for survival.

Why is there an implication that only leviathans survive?

It's "losing" compared to the US? Haha. I guess from a true VC startup bro perspective. It's not "the EU is way behind the US and China", it's "the EU and US are way behind China". Because the latter is the only one who has been taking long-term decision on decision over the last decades, whereas for the other two, 95% is for the short-term, the next quarter, the next election a year from now. The US is even worse in this regard, hence why it's deteriorating even more rapidly.

You might say its rather socialist...

There's a better word for it.

It’s #9 on the list actually

Just missing the social programs that redistribute the wealth to the working class

The system/ideology you're looking for starts with an "F" and ends with "ascism"

An actual socialist would say the state in capitalist society provides a legal and infrastructural framework that supports business enterprises and the accumulation of capital, so it is business as usual. But feel free to throw words around as they mean nothing.

Why don't you exclude the worst performing industries instead?

Because 10 bad performing companies performing worse isn't what drags us down to a recession. Not in terms of stock market.

Waiting for the music to stop…

(Actually I'm not, but the rest of the market seems to be. In this version of musical chairs, you can sit down any time you like—you just miss out on potential gains before the music stops.)

That's because music doesn't stop often and historically not sitting down was almost always a better strategy.

You're playing musical chairs and meanwhile a signifigant part of the workforce isn't even in the building as an audience. Especially Gen Z. We're going to make a truly revolutionary generation from this (I'm not sure if it's in a progressive or regressive way).

Previously discussed:

“ Without data centers, GDP growth was 0.1% in the first half of 2025”

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45512317

Given that the dollar has lost ~10% of its value since the start of the year, that's good... Right?

Well, it may be - hidden, at least in the US, by the "AI"-Bubble. But also an interesting point is that these layoffs do not happen in struggling companies -they all have increasing profits.

It is most likely a way to squeeze out some easy penny and pump up share prices - remember the "shareholder value". Shareholders today are all looking for pump & dump schemes.

Is there anyway to "fix" this? WHy are people only thinking short term these days? That mindset seems a bit... morbid.

"At the end of July, Amazon reported second quarter results which beat Wall Street expectations on several counts, including a 13% year over year increase in sales to $167.7bn (£125bn)."

The stock-owning class is in a boom. The working class is in a recession.

(People who have stock-market investments and need to work for a living are somewhere in between.)

The average of one billionaire gaining £10M and a hundred middle-class folks losing £100k is solidly positive, so this looks like a "growing economy" to many of the usual metrics.

I am not sure whether the people who are benefiting from all this have noticed how often this sort of dynamic in the past has led to torches and pitchforks and the like.

A year on year increase in sales is real. It's not silly metrics like "net worth". Actual value is being exchanged.

Is that an increase in sales, or just everything getting more expensive?

The middle? Oh we are just starting....

Our industry has probably been in a recession for the past 3-4 years. Where have you been?

We are…

We already were in one. You just waited until someone else told you it was too late.

Recession is a term with a very defined meaning and that meaning does not include employment at all.

Recession is officially whatever NBER says it is and it doesn’t have a well defined meaning.

Also it’s by design a trailing designation. You will be in (and possibly out) of a recession before NBER declares one, by definition.

Yes, more accurately we're in the middle of an extremely shitty economy for everyone but stockholders

We've been in a global economic depression for more than a decade already.

Does feel like that

It does include employment. It's discussed in terms of "employment" or "jobs" thresholds and trends.

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

> In the United States, a recession is defined as "a significant decline in economic activity spread across the market, lasting more than a few months, normally visible in real GDP, real income, employment, industrial production, and wholesale-retail sales."[4] The European Union has adopted a similar definition.[5][6]

This is actually a good read: https://www.nber.org/research/business-cycle-dating

Employment is an important indicator according NBER.

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