One can argue that a recession is simply an adjustment to inflation… a RESET if you will.
Do Nothing Republicans are very Unhappy… Kansas votes to support Abortion, 528,000 jobs added in July, unemployment at the lowest in 50 years at 3.5 %
Republicans keep preaching their doom and gloom… if they preach misery long enough… the glass is half empty, not half full…
Recessions typically produce declines in economic output, consumer demand, and employment.
Republicans trot out their talking heads, Mr. McCarthy and Mr. McConnell and all the rest to try and mis-spin the July job numbers… 528,000 new jobs and 3.5 jobless number, the lowest number in 50 years… the Republican talking heads say nothing about the price of gasoline declining almost 90 cents over the past 7 weeks. The two typical Republican talking heads make themselves look silly trying to convince you that you must feel miserable…simply because they say so… if these same Republicans spent as much time trying to solve problems as they do in trying to create problems, the country would be in much better shape.
While some have argued that there have been several examples of soft landings over the last 60 years, including in 1965, 1984 and 1994, we show in our analysis that these periods had little resemblance to the current moment.
In all three episodes, the Fed was operating in an economy with significantly higher unemployment, lower inflation and lower wage growth. In these historical examples, the Fed also raised interest rates well above the inflation rate – unlike today, where inflation is at 8.5% and interest rates are projected to remain below 3% through 2023 – and explicitly acted early to preempt inflation from spiraling, rather than waiting for inflation to already be excessive.
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Republican talking heads throw out words like Recession and Inflation to make you feel bad and if they pitch these words to you long enough you will start to believe them… sort of like sticking a man in an orange jump suit in a cage…
Do Nothing Republicans continue to do Nothing to make your life better, because Republicans don’t want you to feel better…. The Republican Miserability Index…
Republicans Say Economy Is In Recession After It Added Half A Million Jobs In July
Inflation like this can’t last forever. How it will end is now the more salient question. Often it takes a recession to break inflation. Economist Lawrence Summers observed that this has been the case every other time inflation was this high and the labor market was this tight.
Then again, we’ve never before experienced inflation that was caused by shutting off the economy. So maybe this time will be different. There is hope that with some artfully calibrated rate increases and some very, very good messaging, the Federal Reserve can bring inflation down and avoid a recession. The Fed could increase rates just enough to keep inflation from getting worse, and then supply-chain and other post-pandemic pressures will recede and excess inflation will disappear. There already are signs that inflation is moderating.
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There are different ways of evaluating whether the economy is good or bad without making up new definitions of recession.
For the past month or so, Republicans have insisted that the U.S. economy is in a recession, a period of reduced economic activity that can be politically devastating for the party in power.
Then, on Friday, the U.S. Labor Department announced the economy added half a million jobs last month, pushing the national unemployment rate down to 3.5% ― almost as low as it has ever gotten, and a strong indication that the economy is not, in fact, in a recession.
Unlike inflation, which is very much a reality, we are not in a recession yet, or at least not officially. A recession is defined by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), a nonprofit organization that analyzes economic business cycles in the U.S., as a “significant decline in economic activity that is spread across the economy and that lasts more than a few months.”
Even if a downturn does hit, many economists agree that it probably won’t be as bad as the market crashes in 2008 and 2020 that immediately come to mind when hearing the word “recession.”
“If it’s a mild recession, most people probably won’t be worse off. A few people could lose their jobs on the margin, but the unemployment rate won’t go up too high,” Gagnon said.
Unemployment has stayed remarkably low throughout inflation, and the job market is still as hot as ever. The U.S. economy added 390,000 jobs in May, surpassing expectations and boosting hopes that the strong economy might be able to weather a mild recession.
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Recessions in the US are officially declared by a committee of eight economists at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). There is no hard timetable for determining recessions, but it often takes a year before the committee makes an announcement. (There are some common rules of thumb, like two quarters of negative gross domestic product — but these aren’t hard-and-fast rules, and even those metrics are backward-looking.)
Many economists agree that the country isn’t in a recession yet, although there are some worrying signs.
By many measures, the economy still looks pretty resilient. In June, employers added a robust 372,000 jobs to the economy. Job openings have dipped slightly, but at 11.3 million, they still remain well above pre-pandemic levels. Wage growth continues to climb in certain sectors, and new jobless claims are low. The unemployment rate stands at 3.6 percent, just slightly above its level before the pandemic, which was at a 50-year low.
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