How long before it counts as a recession?
I feel like we’ve been in one for years at this point but nobody wants to be the one holding the bag so they’re printing money, creating new metrics that look better, and lying to everybody that things are fine actually.
It works, too. I got in an argument with my coworker because I said Kamala didn’t say shit about helping poor people except when it was used to scold pro-Palestine dissenters.
He said, verbatim, “well, the economy is fine, actually” showing a complete disregard to what the real world is like. Motherfuckers are isolated they never leave the house, of course you’re fine because you don’t have to pay rent, everyone else is suffering.
That’s why it’s so difficult to get people to understand this shit, the second they own a house they don’t have rent increasing by hundreds of dollars every year, they just worry about property taxes and their electricity bill.
This is the “K-Shaped recovery” phenomena. All our usual economic indicators (GDP, unemployment, stonks, housing prices) are strong, yet people keep complaining that the economy is getting worse. The usual move by economists is to point to the numbers and say that the public at large is being hysterical. Yet the general opinion of economists is incongruent with the fact that the bottom 90% of the population in terms of wealth matters less and less to the overall economy every year, and increasingly the economic health of the population as a whole will not show up in the official numbers.
Anecdotally, my workplace is stocking up on a year’s worth of consumable supplies (raw materials, process inputs like tooling, etc), when they usually purchase these things monthly, quarterly, or as needed. Smaller shops likely will struggle to make outlays like this up-front, and will end up paying increased tariffs on a lot of these inputs in the long run.
There may be a short bump while businesses try to beat the price increases, but a lot of places won’t be able to afford their inputs costing 60% more than they did in January and will likely shut down.
Tariff drag. As in tariffs. The magical thing that’s supposed to bring back US manufacturing. Got it.
