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How we will know when a recession is coming?

brookings.edu

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Re: How we will know when a recession is coming?

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They're only JUST NOW starting to get payed what they deserve That is absurd. In a free market with free movement of goods and people, whatever you are getting paid is what you "deserve" aka what other participants in the market are willing to pay for your services. It is only explicit government intervention that overrides this process; subsided renewal energy sources, childcare, housing etc. But with everything e…

I would have thought it was obvious what I meant by "deserve" but apparently I have to spell it out. No, I don't mean that they are owed anything. This is life after all. You nor I, are owed a damn thing. And in a free market, that's explicitly true. Duh. What I mean by "deserve" is... prior generations with similar qualifications enjoyed a much smoother, and more lucrative career. Boomers were handed a golden egg, a…

I agree with your premise that baby boomers have very tenuous grasp on how unique and lucky they were to grow up in the economic time period that they did. When the vast majority of the world's population is third world farmers and your country is at the forefront of industry and technological progress it's easy to coast and succeed.

However, that's clearly no longer the case and the average American needs to compete with a much broader pool of labor, increasing automation, and a growing middle class in more populous, emerging countries. I don't think millennials "deserve" what the baby boomers had; I just think the baby boomers didn't particularly deserve it either and it's becoming more and more obvious that the "normal" they experienced is an outlier era that will not return. Millennials need to learn to compete in this world and on average they are not well equipped to do so because they learned their perspective from a particularly (and unusually) privileged generation.

Re: How we will know when a recession is coming?

#112
post #102
post #67

Maybe I'm just too cynical, but we know that it'll happen just before the next Presidential election. If the party in power can't get enough buy-in from enough influential people.

You believe the party is power has enough sway to move the needle on a $20T economy?

From what I've read over the years, it's happened before.

Or at least, it's been claimed that it's happened before.

PR obviously also plays a huge role.

https://www.nytimes.com/1991/10/09/business/recession-and-re...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_1990s_recession_in_the_U...

https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/the-economy-and-the-elect...

https://www.bizpacreview.com/2019/08/19/fox-friends-not-afra...

https://www.dailywire.com/news/50222/bill-maher-recession-wo...

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/stocks-drop-as-recession...

https://www.salon.com/2019/08/24/history-suggests-that-a-rec...

Re: How we will know when a recession is coming?

#113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They're only JUST NOW starting to get payed what they deserve That is absurd. In a free market with free movement of goods and people, whatever you are getting paid is what you "deserve" aka what other participants in the market are willing to pay for your services. It is only explicit government intervention that overrides this process; subsided renewal energy sources, childcare, housing etc. But with everything e…

I would have thought it was obvious what I meant by "deserve" but apparently I have to spell it out. No, I don't mean that they are owed anything. This is life after all. You nor I, are owed a damn thing. And in a free market, that's explicitly true. Duh. What I mean by "deserve" is... prior generations with similar qualifications enjoyed a much smoother, and more lucrative career. Boomers were handed a golden egg, a…

> Boomers were handed a golden egg, and managed to nearly destroy it.

In point of fact, the policies which did that were adopted while the balance of political and economic power were in the hands of the Silent Generation, but it took a while for the effect to be fully felt and the Boomers were the last generation to have most of their working life before the wheels fell off.

Re: How we will know when a recession is coming?

#114
post #50

For fun, I put together http://isitrecession.com , in the spirit of https://isitchristmas.com It just shows the inverted yield curve, pulling down data from the US treasury everyday, and subtracting the 1 year from the 10 year interest rate.

Can you also plot the S&P 500 (SPY) either overlayed or below the yield curve graph. Would be interesting to correlate.

Will do.

Re: How we will know when a recession is coming?

#115

> The Great Recession officially ended in June of 2009 As a "millennial" who graduated in 2008, I seriously hate reading shit like this. Maybe it recovered for the Boomer's pension funds and 401k's, but it took many of my friends over a decade to find work equal to their qualifications. They're only JUST NOW starting to get payed what they deserve (PHDs, MBAs, and Masters degree holders).

They are using a technical definition of recession.

Technical definitions used by economists are increasingly divorced from reality experienced by people. You don't see a lot of low wage single income families buying 3 bedroom houses anymore but economists will tell us how much richer we are.

Re: How we will know when a recession is coming?

#117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked in that industry during that time period and its just not true that no one came forward. As early as 2003 Warren Buffett straight up called them “weapons of financial destruction”. In 2005, the World Bank released a report suggesting that the derivatives the banks were holding could cause a financial crisis. I remember the day the yield curve inverted in 2005 because I was working for a company that made ris…

You’re right, it’s a bit much to say no-one came forward, but enough wasn’t done to catch what was going before it came crashing down. The comment I was replying to was implying people would notice discrepancies and we would be able to catch it.

If Warren Buffet & the World Bank said that the BLS was cooking the books I bet it would be a big deal.

Re: How we will know when a recession is coming?

#118
post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would have thought it was obvious what I meant by "deserve" but apparently I have to spell it out. No, I don't mean that they are owed anything. This is life after all. You nor I, are owed a damn thing. And in a free market, that's explicitly true. Duh. What I mean by "deserve" is... prior generations with similar qualifications enjoyed a much smoother, and more lucrative career. Boomers were handed a golden egg, a…

I agree with your premise that baby boomers have very tenuous grasp on how unique and lucky they were to grow up in the economic time period that they did. When the vast majority of the world's population is third world farmers and your country is at the forefront of industry and technological progress it's easy to coast and succeed. However, that's clearly no longer the case and the average American needs to compete…

I like your perspective on the situation. It's both accurate, and far less pessimistic than mine. I'll do my best to adopt this way of thinking going forward.

Re: How we will know when a recession is coming?

#120
post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How?

Writing option contracts and shorting the market are two examples which come to mind.

Let’s say you had an algorithm that predicted when a recession was declared on average (this is important) 2 months earlier than when it was technically acknowledged (what this algorithm purports to do).

What series of orders would you put in & where to take advantage of it? What market conditions would make money for those orders?

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