this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2023
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[–] [email protected] 127 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (11 children)

Economists have predicted 20 of the last 5 recessions...

Economics is great at explaining why something happened or what may happen in the future but complete shit at predicting when something will happen.

For a decade in the run up to the 2008 housing crash everyone was saying it was just around the corner but they were wrong for 9 of the 10 years.

If every year you predict the world will end or the market will crash, eventually you will be correct...

[–] themeatbridge 42 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Right, but if you're watching someone blow up a balloon, you know eventually it will pop even if you don't know exactly when. That doesn't mean you're wrong to suggest we should stop inflating the balloon to avoid the pop.

If you just say the market will crash, maybe it will or maybe it won't. If you say that the conditions exist for a crash, and describe them accurately, you're right whether there is a crash or not.

And if you say there's 100% chance, not only are you likely to be wrong, you're also a useless moron deserving of ridicule.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

if you’re watching someone blow up a balloon, you know eventually it will pop even if you don’t know exactly when.

There are two problems with this.

1: When a lot of people are making money by inflating the balloon, telling them to stop is not going to work well.

2: If the ballon ends up taking 20 breaths to pop and you are telling them to stop every time they blow in the ballon and it doesn't for the first 19 times, they tend to think you are the boy who cried wolf and just keep on ignoring you.

[–] themeatbridge 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)
  1. You're right, that's why you need legislation and regulation to prevent them from blowing up the balloon. The people pointing out the causal relationship aren't necessarily in a position to do that themselves, they need to raise awareness so that there is sufficient concern to do something about it. That ain't happening as long as bribery is legal, but that's not the economist's fault.

  2. That's also not the economist's fault. Raising the alarm and accurately predicting the causes of a crash are the things the economist are supposed to do. The boy who cried wolf was pretending when he raised the alarm. The economist is accurately describing the state of affairs, and the potential ramifications. Whether it takes 20 breaths or 100, the balloon will pop unless we take action and that remains true. If the boy who cried wolf saw wolves, and the wolves didn't attack the sheep the first night, the boy is still doing his job to warn people. To torture this analogy a bit more, it's like everyone can see the approaching wolves, and it is the townspeople who are the idiots for not believing the boy.

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[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Economics is great at coming up with plausible sounding stories about why things happened, but that doesn't mean those explanations are correct. The fact that the same theories lead to incorrect predictions is a strong indicator that the explanations are wrong, too.

Or to put it more bluntly, most of the field of economics looks a lot like a pseudoscience.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (3 children)

most of the field of economics looks a lot like a pseudoscience.

Well, when one of the founding assumptions is that humans make rational economic decisions, you are in for a bad time.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

What if you assume they have infinite time horizons or instantaneous and free transaction costs over infinite distances?

[–] HeyThisIsntTheYMCA 7 points 1 year ago

Assume that this cow is a sphere

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[–] hemmes 5 points 1 year ago

I may have been early but I'm not wrong

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[–] phoneymouse 92 points 1 year ago (7 children)

They couldn’t resist adding “in blow to Biden”

Stupid fucks.

[–] HeyThisIsntTheYMCA 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I guess biden got that blow after all

[–] FlyingSquid 13 points 1 year ago

You're thinking of Clinton.

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[–] Cryophilia 60 points 1 year ago (2 children)

These fucks want a recession SO BADLY and it's just NOT HAPPENING. I love it. Go get em, Powell.

[–] Shard 36 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Cause they get rich during a recession by buying things on the cheap because the over-leveraged middle class suddenly can't afford things and have to discard them to remain solvent. They sell off the extra car or dump their shares for cash to make ends meet.

How do you induce a recession/downturn? By writing about an impending collapse. If enough people believe you, they'll tighten their figurative belts, save more and spend less, causing the very recession you wrote about.

(Above is oversimplified by you can see the general logic)

[–] Cryophilia 10 points 1 year ago

Equally big factor: they get rich when there's NOT a recession as long as interest rates are low. Low interest rates = high stock returns, more or less. So if they can bully the Fed into lowering interest rates to avert a recession, they still get rich.

Ever notice how the stock market tanks whenever there's a good jobs report? It's perverse, but wall street is rooting for main street to fail. (I mean, let's be honest, they never really cared about main street, but now their fortunes are directly tied to our failure).

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (3 children)

If I remember correctly, a recession did happen. It used to be defined as two quarters of negative GDP growth back to back, but yellen simply changed that definition.

[–] Cryophilia 25 points 1 year ago (5 children)

You do remember correctly, but you (and most people) were always wrong. The two quarters thing was a rule of thumb, not an official designation. And Yellen didn't change it, that's just Republican/big business propaganda.

While gross domestic product (GDP) is the broadest measure of economic activity, the often-cited identification of a recession with two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth is not an official designation. The designation of a recession is the province of a committee of experts at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), a private non-profit research organization that focuses on understanding the U.S. economy. The NBER recession is a monthly concept that takes account of a number of monthly indicators—such as employment, personal income, and industrial production—as well as quarterly GDP growth. Therefore, while negative GDP growth and recessions closely track each other, the consideration by the NBER of the monthly indicators, especially employment, means that the identification of a recession with two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth does not always hold.

https://www.bea.gov/help/glossary/recession

We got close, but there never was a recession.

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[–] [email protected] 41 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Shit like this is why we had the layoffs we say at the beginning of the year. It was all hysteria made up by a bunch of idiots who want a recession for…. Reasons.

The economy is strong, inflation is down overall (though still high), and unemployment has been below 4% for nearly 2 years, something we haven’t seen for more than 20 years.

The recession we’ve seen this year is fake.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago

Not so much fake, as manufactured.

The jobs market was doing well, unemployment was low. Many middle-class people had been working remotely for two years, and saved thousands in commuting costs. The housing market was leveling out, prices were reasonable, and interest rates were low.

People were finally starting to feel an inkling of security and independence. They could afford to buy a house, change jobs, sell the second car, and put some money away for a rainy day.

Which is a nightmare scenario for corporations that feed on a financially desperate populace.

So corporations jacked up prices, blaming supply-chain issues, forced workers back into the office, and laid off thousands despite record profits.

The Fed pitched in, hiking interest rates, and locking millions of Americans out of the housing market, and with it, their best path to financial independence, and vowed to keep those rates high until the unemployment rate was back at a level that the Corporate masters determined sufficiently punitive, and the working class had exhausted their savings.

When the workers are acceptably cowed, and the wealthy are satisfied that they will no longer resist subjugation, they will declare the economy 'back to normal'

[–] boywar3 15 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Just remember that low unemployment often means severe "underemployment" as people with degrees and other qualifications are forced to take jobs that pay significantly less.

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[–] [email protected] 34 points 1 year ago (2 children)

lol that rag will take any chance to attack anyone left of center

[–] themeatbridge 73 points 1 year ago (3 children)
[–] A_cook_not_a_chef 34 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Which is crazy to me. He's a huge neolib. He may be more progressive than anticipated, but he certainly isn't on the left.

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[–] lolrightythen 16 points 1 year ago

Lol, gottem!

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Took me a second. Good one.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

"Anyone left or center". Lol.

[–] sturmblast 21 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Never trust financial institutions opinions

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (7 children)

The GDP fell for two quarters though. They just changed the definition of recession.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (15 children)

No they did not. The NBER is always the office that declares a recession and they did not do so because employment numbers did not match recession like conditions.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

True, but that most likely means that the Finance houses found a new bubble or regulation capture that will allow them to buy mega yachts for a few more years until it blows up and governments bail them out with public money again.

[–] ManosTheHandsOfFate 7 points 1 year ago

"The report of my death was an exaggeration." -Mark Twain

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

Don't get your panties in a bunch - they said 100% likely but they didn't talk about the 80% margin of error, that's all!

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

Just keep changing the way you calculate inflation every 2 years, problem solved.

[–] zepheriths 7 points 1 year ago

You know who else has a recession? ( going by public definition of recession of 2 quarters of negative gdp growth)

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There's a 50% chance things will happen 100% of the time. Guaranteed.

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