2024 - vibe cession: https://www.businessinsider.com/consumers-pessimistic-on-eco...
2025 - "a recession in 2025": https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/2025-stock-m...
people just so desperately want the USA to be in a recession it seems.
When even big tech companies are starting to say it, the highest margin businesses with the highest paid workers, how do you imagine most other industries are and have been feeling?
Most people don't judge the economic situation based on graphs the TV shows them, they judge it based on how much month they have left at the end of the pay cheque and how easy can they get a new decent job when they get laid off.
The economy != the stock market. I wish HN would get that, but since a lot of people here are asset millionaires, they're way too out of touch.
You've got it the wrong way around.
People are desperate to explain why their experience of the economy; Which for most people is "not good", doesn't match the formal economic metrics and definitions of a "recession". Constant layoffs, horrible job market, even worse housing market, and the lingering inflation.
The other half of this is of course, the bubble. Everyone knows AI is a bubble. Everyone knows that sometime soon, Nvidia & friends are going to come crashing down. AI may be the future, but people don't have the trillions of dollars burning holes in their pockets to justify these valuations. Even AI execs are openly admitting there's a bubble.
So there's heightened interest in the economy minus AI; What are things going to look like without the bubble? How much is AI hype propping up the economic indicators, if not the economy as a whole?
The alarm being that the answers are "bad" and "a lot" respectively. While direct AI investment spending has a limited effect, so much of the US' spending is driven by those whose money is from assets (the rich and the retired), that the stock market's soaring has an outsized impact. And when the bubble bursts, the stock market crashes, and that spending vanishes.
More: "labor market and consumer spending is less meaningful than ever before"
The masses are unable to truly internalize the latter.
https://www.thedailyupside.com/advisor/investing-strategies/...
Having high amount of spending come from the asset wealth is by itself not immediately a problem. Having a bubble is by itself not immediately a problem.
It's the combination of the two that's dangerous.
Wasn't there some polling recently that showed that most people thought they were doing well themselves but that everybody else was suffering. Clearly that doesn't add up and it's largely down to the overly negative tone of the news media.
They looked at headline numbers and saw that everything was improving and couldn’t understand why people were behaving as if we were in a recession.
The current situation is a lot worse. Everything isn’t improving. It’s improving but more slowly, flat or getting worse. So the administration is reduced to pointing to the only things that are improving (albeit more slowly). Hence the Attorneh General’s infamous response in her congressional hearing on the Epstein files, that the Dow was over 50k.
Ultimately it comes down to the K shaped economy. The upper arm of the K is doing better than the lower arm is doing worse, so the average is a rise, but in reality the number of people in the lower arm is significantly greater than the number of people in the upper, hence the “vibecession”.
There's plenty of little nuggets like this to point to. US 2025 GDP ex AI investment was in a recession. US equity market ex tech does not outperform e.g. Europe. And so on.
The tech one is more compelling. The US equity market dominance has been driven by it's very successful tech business. Everything else is perhaps in a similar malaise to eg Europe.
Markets have an obscene number of variables to consider in any analysis. An industry can be doing both good and bad depending on what the product is, and who the customer is.
At the end of the day, I continue to believe the Housing Theory of Everything thesis when it comes to the sense that people are on an economic treadmill where nothing ever gets better. And it helps describe the engine behind the K-shaped recovery. If we can fix the rent-seeking, we should be able to get back to a world where a rising tide lifts all boats.
https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-every...
Nobody would care for a millisecond about the doomsayers if there wasn't some dread in their lives about what's happening.
Even if we are in a recession, we need to start fostering looking towards the future. Not just trying to 'fix' things, but actually looking towards doing new big things. As John Green might say, there are two basic ways you can make the world better. You can decrease the suck or increase the awesome. I take this to imply that if you only decrease the suck then you can never be better than you were. It may be necessary but you also need to increase the awesome to keep growing and America hasn't been focused on the awesome for a while now. Let's increase the awesome even if there is suck still around.
Also ... doom and gloom gets more views.