Despite the considerable efforts of propaganda departments trying to either polish the proverbial turd* (there are always elections coming up, in this case sooner and more pivotal than most and the economy is fairly key in winning those) or not create a self reinforcing narrative (if they run out saying the sky is falling then it will snowball that much faster/harder where those in blissful ignorance... yeah -- you owe it to yourself to watch what way the wind is really blowing and plan your moves accordingly) there are very few that can deny we are in an economic recession these days even if we ignore the generally held definition of two quarters of negative growth in GDP (which the US has seen, and GDP also includes government spending which is dubious to include). GDP is also GDP, inflation (much less the real inflation http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/inflation-charts ) would also have to be accounted for in this and that does not make things better.
Whether reckless money printing, limited resources (generally or artificial courtesy of supply chains), cheap debt (granted that is also money printing), housing crash (granted that is combo of cheap debt and lack of supply), natural disasters, the plague the other year, oversupply of resources (the snap back was mistaken for continuous growth), rise of automation or something else we could unpack but for this I am more interested in the effects.
*the "there are job openings" narrative is largely silly as employment has not yet recovered 2019 levels (normally we don't look that far back and instead do year on year and quarter on quarter but if "stay in your home citizen" was the order of the day then it makes sense to go back. https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/employment-rate ) and most of that was in hospitality (hotels, restaurants and such like), which is on the way back down right now by most metrics (again compared to 2019) you care to ponder with a minor mask for price bumps (businesses and super rich will pay pretty much whatever you ask). It would also be noted many claiming not a recession are also those that claimed inflation would never happen and when that became impossible to ignore then just a small passing fad.
So then have you seen shops with inventory in containers in the car park, have you seen shops locking up not even their valuable goods, bare shelves (another type of anti theft in some cases -- lose 4 packs and you have lost 4 packs, lose 12 and that is worse), has inflation been rather hard, are you seeing masses of motivated sellers in housing/cars/luxury items (to say nothing of banks being rather lenient these days if you have fell behind to attempt to stall out foreclosures which benefit very few, even more so in the US with the jinglemail/ability to walk away), do you work in a shop and find yourself repricing things more than normal and with greater bumps, those with credit card debt rising, even big tech companies are hiring freeze at best and letting people go in far from uncommon so is the job market around you not as rosy as some claim**? More generally it is noted various indexes beyond simple consumer price index are far from healthy -- wholesale price indexes are rather up, industrial orders are down (aka nobody is building new factories/spinning up new lines of things), new housing permits have fallen off a cliff somewhat, rich people appear to be shopping in cheaper shops***, phone companies note people are pushing the bill out a bit where they can, supply in the housing market is rather higher (homes going for longer, exceeding asking price is a different matter entirely where a year or so back it was the norm, layoffs are huge in the house selling business right now), city/state budgets are rather cash strapped even compared to years ago when it was not good (most US cities are all but destined to go bankrupt/need a bailout), new and continuing jobless claims are also not painting a rosy picture of the world.
**the job openings lot also seem to be carefully ignoring that the job losses are a so called lagging indicator in that it is something used to bolster a claim in retrospect after the numbers are in rather than something you do in real time (though real time data is not good either).
***recessions tend to work from the bottom of the pile on up. That is to say the poorest get hit first, then working class, then lower middle class, upper middle class, rich and oh shit the 1% is too big to fail better bail them out.
If you are not in the US feel free to share what might be going on around you too -- as the US goes so does the rest of the world (there are downsides to having your world reserve currency take a knock, not that most other places are paragons of financial good sense). In my case my bank (major world player bank) cancelled my overdraft (not that I ever use it), have closed any number of branches (reduced hours and robots in most others) and instituted a bunch of fees way out of line with anything they previously had in there presumably as protection against those unfunded liabilities (if I used my overdraft and did not have to pay to get a new card when I lost one then that would be money they have to account for, if it is not a possibility then they have more funds available to do things with).
Whether reckless money printing, limited resources (generally or artificial courtesy of supply chains), cheap debt (granted that is also money printing), housing crash (granted that is combo of cheap debt and lack of supply), natural disasters, the plague the other year, oversupply of resources (the snap back was mistaken for continuous growth), rise of automation or something else we could unpack but for this I am more interested in the effects.
*the "there are job openings" narrative is largely silly as employment has not yet recovered 2019 levels (normally we don't look that far back and instead do year on year and quarter on quarter but if "stay in your home citizen" was the order of the day then it makes sense to go back. https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/employment-rate ) and most of that was in hospitality (hotels, restaurants and such like), which is on the way back down right now by most metrics (again compared to 2019) you care to ponder with a minor mask for price bumps (businesses and super rich will pay pretty much whatever you ask). It would also be noted many claiming not a recession are also those that claimed inflation would never happen and when that became impossible to ignore then just a small passing fad.
So then have you seen shops with inventory in containers in the car park, have you seen shops locking up not even their valuable goods, bare shelves (another type of anti theft in some cases -- lose 4 packs and you have lost 4 packs, lose 12 and that is worse), has inflation been rather hard, are you seeing masses of motivated sellers in housing/cars/luxury items (to say nothing of banks being rather lenient these days if you have fell behind to attempt to stall out foreclosures which benefit very few, even more so in the US with the jinglemail/ability to walk away), do you work in a shop and find yourself repricing things more than normal and with greater bumps, those with credit card debt rising, even big tech companies are hiring freeze at best and letting people go in far from uncommon so is the job market around you not as rosy as some claim**? More generally it is noted various indexes beyond simple consumer price index are far from healthy -- wholesale price indexes are rather up, industrial orders are down (aka nobody is building new factories/spinning up new lines of things), new housing permits have fallen off a cliff somewhat, rich people appear to be shopping in cheaper shops***, phone companies note people are pushing the bill out a bit where they can, supply in the housing market is rather higher (homes going for longer, exceeding asking price is a different matter entirely where a year or so back it was the norm, layoffs are huge in the house selling business right now), city/state budgets are rather cash strapped even compared to years ago when it was not good (most US cities are all but destined to go bankrupt/need a bailout), new and continuing jobless claims are also not painting a rosy picture of the world.
**the job openings lot also seem to be carefully ignoring that the job losses are a so called lagging indicator in that it is something used to bolster a claim in retrospect after the numbers are in rather than something you do in real time (though real time data is not good either).
***recessions tend to work from the bottom of the pile on up. That is to say the poorest get hit first, then working class, then lower middle class, upper middle class, rich and oh shit the 1% is too big to fail better bail them out.
If you are not in the US feel free to share what might be going on around you too -- as the US goes so does the rest of the world (there are downsides to having your world reserve currency take a knock, not that most other places are paragons of financial good sense). In my case my bank (major world player bank) cancelled my overdraft (not that I ever use it), have closed any number of branches (reduced hours and robots in most others) and instituted a bunch of fees way out of line with anything they previously had in there presumably as protection against those unfunded liabilities (if I used my overdraft and did not have to pay to get a new card when I lost one then that would be money they have to account for, if it is not a possibility then they have more funds available to do things with).
