Have you shopped at Macy's recently? The quality of clothing there is so cheaply made and overpriced, I'm not surprised at all that people aren't shopping there.
Am I the only one that thinks this has been the longest call for a recession ever? This "coming" recession has been on the news for at least a year. Usually it's a surprise or only reported when we are in the middle of it. It makes me think that it's going to be very shallow since many of us are expecting it.
There's an old joke that economists have predicted 9 of the last 5 recessions. People start warning about a recession pretty much the instant the last one is over.
It's pretty much bog-standard economics. We like an overheated economy, so we keep pumping it up until finally somebody swerves. Then we get a recession. Then we promise to do better next time. And we don't.
So the longest recession calls I can remember were for the 2020 recession, which was about 13 years since the last one. It was obvious for nearly a decade that the economy was overheated, but it just kept going. Were it not for COVID, it might well have kept going.
It's only been a few years since then, and we're still doing the anti-recession measures from the last one. Consumers still aren't feeling great about it.
I think happened is that the last recession was pretty brief. And right now we're more suffering shocks from the Ukraine war (which spills out into oil prices, which spills out into everything else). So it's not great for consumers, but the economy as a whole is actually still ticking along.
That some people are expecting the recession really has no bearing on how strong it will be. That really has more to do with asset market prices than recession strength ( which incidentally don’t seem to have got the memo.)
It really has to do with slow downs in manufacturing, construction, sales, and employment that feed off each other. And at a deeper level with liquidity cycles and whether conditions are easing or tightening. Conditions are tightening, and of the four markets I mentioned earlier, all are down. Employment is hanging in there the best, but that’s always the last domino to fall. We may well already be in the recession, but it’s only usually called after the fact.
Between student loans payment deferrals, interest rate hikes and staggered layoffs - the actual recession keeps getting delayed. Technically there isn’t anything surprising if you keep a watch out for bubbles, in which there are currently multiple
As this reinforces, discretionary spending tends to go, ironically, in opposite directions: anything that makes you fat and anything that makes you beautiful (or claims to)
