There's quite a few factors here that delayed what should have logically already happened.
1. All the tarriff reactions cause US companies to import a huge amount of stuff for 2025. From what I understand, we're about to exhaust all of those imports.
2. The unemployment reports (especially the U3 numbers) hide quite a bit of turmoil going on under the hood of the job market.
- If you lost your job and switched to Uber/Doordash, you're not unemployed.
- If you are riding on severance pay instead of filikg for unemployment, you're not unemployed.
- If you got tired of throwing out hundreds of apps only to get automated rejections and take a break a month, you're not unemployed.
- If you just graduated into this hellscape and can't qualify for any unemployment, you're not unemployed (you're technically not part of the workforce yet).
There's a lot of these small shifts in how jobs work that make U3 less reliable in reflecting reality. And I only touched the surface of these issues.
3. Continuing on the U3 with a point worthy of its own bullet: the unemployment appears flat, but the makeup of what's happening per industry really lays down the reality. The only industries growing are hospitality (aka food service and similar sorts of duties) and health care. And to top it off these "growing" industries shift more and more to fractional work. Pretty much every other industry is down. So people are getting laid off/fired and moving to part time work to get by. "Stable" by unemployment numbers, but very unstable on the day-to-day. Add in the recent congressional bills for healthcare subsidies and we're throwing more gas on rhe fire.
4. I'm sure it's been said so much by now, but AI in the US is the only thing holding up the GDP. Without that massive investment, the GDP would be at best, dead flat. The US isn't growing in a way that reflects actual yields to anyone outside of a select few shareholders. We're not building more houses, mining more materials (on the contrary, we've resumed ransacking others'), manufacturing more machinery, nor even producing more service value for customers and businesses. We're putting all hedges on one thing with an uncertain outcome. If that industry declines, so does the rest of the US.
5. The K shaped economy. I have to check these numbers again, but I believe that spending is indeed up, but the makeup of spending per income band is more stark than ever. The too 10% income households makes up half of US's spending. But there are signs that even many high income houses add also starting to hunker down on spending.
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That was a lot and it still only scratches the surface. But the TLDR version is that there's a lot of statistics massaging over the real struggles of life and many industries reaching a breaking point they did a good job putting off. But by this point it will only take a needle to break this camel.