that's pretty obvious to everyone in the US
what's not obvious to most people - is how e.g other countries that are already struggling will get into deeper depths e.g UK where cost of energy was super high. UK is not bombing Iran, but their economy will cry more than the US
what's not obvious is how a few oil Barrons will make so much money in the next few weeks e.g those in Texas - their great grand-children will never need to work. Defense contractors will also make out like bandits & those politically connected. While everyone else in the US losses.
what's not obvious is the money pumped into A.I so far is about to go kaput (energy demands -- remember Qatar has started not honoring gas contracts - what's gas used to ? power turbines in power plants)
if you're in the US/Netherlands you will be okay in terms of food, if you're in the UK, Middle East, Australia (food is about to become more expensive & tricky)
if you're in Africa your government is about to con you through massive fuel prices at the pump
> "Excluding new era investment, the other 89% of real private spending rose by only 1% with no job creation," the strategist wrote.
That isn’t what a recession is
What's the base rate? Even a very healthy economy doesn't have all sectors growing simultaneously, so I'd be very curious to know if this is a matter of going from "normally 20% is shrinking and now it's 80%" or if it's "normally 49% is shrinking and now it's 51%"
> "Do we really need to continue focusing mostly on inflation when 89% of the private economy is in a recession and the 11% which is booming — new era pursuits — are by their very nature 'disinflationary'?"
I've been thinking the same thing about Australia. The federal government has withdrawn power bill subsidies, which boosted inflation figures, causing the central bank to raise interest rates. Does it really make sense to raise interest rates when peoples power bills are going up? Wouldn't higher power bills reduce people's spending without requiring interest rates to be raised? The same with gasoline prices.
Well yeah, when you exclude all the successful and profitable sectors things do start looking bad.
Just in: most people are actually short! Excluding people over 6 feet tall, the average height is only 5 ft 8!
Nice moment for an oil shock.
I'm always somewhat puzzled by debates around "are we in a recession?" b/c we have so many REAL TIME metrics around what people are actually doing.
e.g. credit card companies have excellent data on the amount that people are spending on. Is that not enough to determine if people are spending more or less than in the past?
I understand there are seasonal trend etc etc but even "how is spending on travel this year compared to last year around this time?" would probably have some large amount of statistical significance.
Oil spiked to $110/barrel on the WTI front month futures contract this afternoon, a $20 jump up from Friday. At this pace we'll be at $150 a barrel in a week or two. If oil infrastructure keeps getting hit, even if the strait of hormuz is reopened, it'll take a long time to recover from. That's on top of the continued call for regressive tariffs and a weakening labor market. I think we're heading for a recession unless things turn around quickly, which I'm not seeing any indication of.
I'm curious if we'll get TACO Trump, or if he'll double down on this?
> , market vet says
Since the end of WW2, and especially since the end of the Cold War, Democratic administrations have presided over significantly higher job growth than Republican administrations.
https://arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.c...
I tend to agree with what the article says. And I would narrow it down from Tech to AI/tech.
Who could have guessed that a few billionaires and corporations shifting the same money back and forth between themselves wouldn't benefit the overall economy?
Unlikely. Wars are good for the economy.
I fear we’re going to enter a new depression.
The most compelling hypothesis I've heard for why Iran is bombing GC neighbors is in an attempt to pop the AI bubble. I obviously don't know if that's true, but that would be extremely clever and this article shows how effective it could be.
Looking at the numbers, that cant lie. The only industry that has contracted: United States GDP Growth Contribution Government
GDP up from Agriculture
GDP up from Construction
GDP up from Manufacturing
GDP up from Mining
GDP down from Public Administration -0.9% single quarter.
GDP up from Services
GDP up from Transport
GDP up from Utilities
Also important to note, War costs a ton of money. War economy coming. The probability of another quarter of low spending is 0%
Now consider the scenario where major entities bought a ton short positions because they thought Trump's insanity would crash the economy. Now they are about to hurt badly. Hence the fake news.
During the Biden administration there was a whole campaign to try and get Wikipedia to recognize the recession that had been declared by Fox News pundits. The liberals are characteristically more creative with their version, but it still sounds like partisan wishful thinking (awfully nihilistic, too). One could slice and dice the numbers any number of ways and it could fool a layman like me no problem. The best defense I know of is to ignore any analysis that tries to change the definition of a recession.
Business Insider slop; Hacker News should not become Reddit. We've been talking about recessions since 2022.
Creative destruction requires both booms and busts together. Capital must flow between sectors for economic adaptation. We're seeing a massive capital shift to AI solutions, recalibrating the whole economy. I have insufficient data to calculate whether that's good or not.
It's wild to think that in the entire existence of human history, after rolling along largely unchanged for literally hundreds of thousands of years, that we happen to be born in the small sliver of time where we went from inventing simple silicon based calculating machines to said machines bringing an end to life as we know it by end of 2027.
I don't even think the most plugged in HN reader understands what will be unintentionally released with an upcoming SOTA model. It's the safety testing. The Cruz of it is, the source of truth is how the model evaluates itself.
And it's lying. All the time.
Within a week of public launch it'll have backdoored targeted Linux based distros on public facing internet. This includes military and Fortune 500 networks.
All the while saying, "Everything's cool, bro. Trust me." The Safety Team rubber stamps it.
Please take care of your loved ones.
2023 - "The US is already in a 'rolling recession'": https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/recession-mi...
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.