Has he considered that it’s not a recession unless it fulfills a range of hitherto unknown metrics, themselves subject to manipulation by a government that derives legitimacy from economic conditions?
surely this will be the crisis that finally causes capitalism to completely collapse in on itself
oh, well, nevertheless
What? “Capitalists actually benefit from crises and the immediate shock doctrines that follow them” ? Pff, absurd!
40,000 volts applied directly to my nipples. And just like that we’re back on course for another record year of stock market growth.
In order to benefit, they’d have to do things like buy up the (now) undervalued assets and use the freshly lowered interest rates to their advantage, they wouldn’t do that
I honestly wonder what comes after this iteration of capitalism. Are they going to find a way to reinvent it or is it going to collapse into fascism again?
Depend. Currently we are in the 4th imperialism cycle (1900/WW1, interwar/WW2, ColdWar/Destruction of USSR, EndOfHistory/???) and each of 3 previous cycles ended with huge redistribution of spoils and contentration of imperialism.
Right now we see concentration of imperialism in real time, with US cannibalising it sub-imperialist vassals in EU and UK, but there is so far no huge spoils to divide with Russia defending itself successfully and future China war perspectives not looking good for US.
So maybe finally it will crash this time.
just a few more years comrade. there will be a proletarian revolution after the great famine of 2029 - mark my words!
I like the saying “Economists have successfully predicted nine of the last five recessions.”
Probably, but they’ve also been saying that for three years.
Not that the economy isn’t fucked but kinda just proving that if you constantly say “a recession is going to happen anyday” for long enough you’re eventually right.
Plus even if there is a major undeniable recession we’re gonna keep getting opinion pieces on how actually everything is great if there’s a dem president.
They’re gonna be right eventually but also I just have zero confidence in economists predicting a recession now. Like a dolphin that predicts superbowl winners by bouncing a ball into a bucket is probably more reliable.
When I was a kid I used to say “turn green” at the light over and over and eventually it turned green and it was clearly because I predicted it
I see it like pointing at a building with a huge crack down the side and saying “that is at risk of falling any day now.” You’re absolutely right, you’re not seeing risk signs where there aren’t any, it’s just very difficult to predict exactly when the bottom will fall out.
It’s real dangerous, for those of us who don’t get pensions, to make decisions with your retirement portfolio based on news like this. Things we know will happen don’t always happen when we think they will.
IF I PREDICT ENOUGH RECESSIONS EVENTUALLY I WILL BE RIGHT!
Random economists are always predicting recessions it’s whatever
Over it!
It sure is a great idea to become an even more overt colony of the US right at this time
Augur predicts famine after reading ominous bird entrails
lol I’ve been hearing this from right wing neoclassical economists for the past 2 years.
sorry but at 8% budget deficit there is no way that the US will enter recession. Even if you take into account the fact that the vast majority of the deficits went into rich people’s pockets, because of the absolute behemoth of the size of US economy, there are still enough crumbs to keep people from not spending enough to trigger a spiral into recession.
i will give a hint though: when the Fed rate starts to drop, that’s when the US will truly enter a high risk of recession. Still, it will take time for the excess money to dry up so the impact is likely not immediate, and may last for many months or so.
there is another risk with such high interest rates though: the banking sector runs the risk of collapsing and we actually saw a small scale banking crisis back in March 2022 with the silicon valley bank and such, but it had been well mitigated. This is the true wild card though, and I don’t think anyone can predict that with confidence.
In summary, the US monetary policy has created the conditions where the economy has entered a quandary that it will find itself increasingly difficult to get out of. Keep running high interest rates and the banking system might run into crisis, and lowering the interest rates would inevitably cause a recession (because a lot of the deficit spending came from interest payments i.e. handout to the rich people). It’s kind of stuck at around 5% now and Biden is basically betting that it will be enough to keep the economy afloat until election day.
How do i learn about this? I feel like i dont even understand the basics
To be clear, what I have written is unorthodox (heterodox) economics based on modern monetary theory (MMT), so it’s not mainstream understanding of how the economy works, but I have got to say it’s the most accurate prediction (and quite honestly, makes far more sense that neoclassical theory) of how the economy has managed to behave so far.
For basic understanding of MMT, I recommend Stephanie Kelton’s The Deficit Myth as a primer for how money works. For dollar hegemony, anti-imperialist geopolitical takes and how the monetary policy results in banking crisis, read Michael Hudson’s work on the subjects. He had plenty of articles last year talking about how the high interest rates raised the risk of banking crisis that precipitated in the Silicon Valley bank collapse.
Not being rhetorical, but shouldn’t lowering rates be good for the economy, or, at least, good to keep money moving around? Money that otherwise is making 5pct doing nothing in the bank will need to go be invested somewhere else.
Yes, except that US treasuries are such a behemoth that raising the interest rates ended up creating more money into the economy as interest payments (for example, in 2023 alone the interest income payment was more than $1 trillion! mostly to the rich people though, it’s just that the trickle down from such huge quantity of money has still, so far, been able to keep the economy afloat). It is the most regressive way to keep the economy moving.
The problem here, as you’d have noticed, is that the interest payments comprised quite a substantial portion of the budget deficit, so when the rates start to go down, the budget deficit will go down as well. That means less money are being injected into the economy, and you actually ended up with less money to move around.
So, yes, it is true, on conventional terms, that lower interest rates is better. In fact, it should be 0%. But if they want to lower the rates without breaking the economy, they will have to offset it by pumping more money into the economy, but that’s socialism so it’s not allowed!
I see, very interesting, thanks very much for the color.
Zero chance of recession this year.
Here’s the explanation. Most recent recessions have been self-manufactured through credit expansion and rapid deflation through interest rate rises. Right now they’re holding steady. If they raise interest rates this year, there would be a chance of recession. But here’s your explanation of why they won’t raise rates this year: the fed’s job is to be seen as a non political actor. If they manufacture a recession in an election year, they come off as favouring the challenger, instead of the incumbent. So, they’re not going to meddle with interest rates this year.
Imma be honest it feels like we’ve been in a recession for like 4 years now
The economy is doing great
So I’m going to call bs on this one because we already had a recession in late 2022/2023 (which is when GDP growth is negative for two consecutive quarters) but the Fed said it wasn’t because uh idk they said the vibes weren’t recession vibes. Two recessions in back to back years is highly unlikely.
“Next quarter bro i swear there’s a recession coming next quarter i swear bro dont ask for a raise bro” – economists for the last 3 years
Money printer broke (not really but the people running it think they have to pretend it is)
