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“My point is that perceptual bias can affect nut jobs and scientists alike. If we hold too rigidly to what we think we know, we ignore or avoid evidence of anything that might change our mind.”
Martha Beck
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It just seems nutty to me talking about a recession. Nutty because we have a healthy labor participation rate, unemployment is less than 6% (which historically we would be applauding), the overall growth is well over 2% and estimated to remain at 2% or above. It’s nutty to me because inflation continues to ease while corporate profits remain at an astounding high. The implication to that would be is there some room, if corporations had it in their good hearts, to actually lower some prices and still maintain some healthy profits. That eases some price point pain for people (and they spend more and the economy grows and, well, … yeah …). It’s a bit nutty to me because while people will point to sell offs in the stock markets the reality would be is the majority of the businesses seeing a sell off just reported positive earnings and positive growth. It’s just that their earnings and growth weren’t ‘enough’ for an insatiable market (and , yeah, the share valuation was a bit nutty in the first place). It’s nutty to me because I envision what it would be like facing this when we had free (money when interest rates were at zero). That would have been bad. The reality would be is that we actually have some flexibility to be able to address some of the market concerns. It’s nutty to me because the fundamentals of the US economy are about as solid as they have been in almost two decades. And generally speaking it’s nutty to me because it’s almost like we are asking to be in a recession. What I mean by that is while we talked about the nuttiness of the ‘vibecession’ and how a healthy economy was being portrayed as imminently going to become bad, we now appear to be seizing upon individual data points to give us the reason to believe we deserve to be in a recession. That is nuts.
That said.
America has a nutty view in that it is always on the lookout for not only something better, but for the worse to happen. And while we always talk about our thirst for hope what we really want is to hurt people we hate. So while we drone on and on about unemployment and not enough growth what we want is an enemy and something (or someone) to lead us to victory against that enemy. It is a nutty version of purpose. Instead of finding ways to help people the general narrative is to attempt to inflict damage. This nutty malleability of truth disorients not only the general narrative, but people. It’s crept into the world TikTok video by TikTok video, Instagram by Instagram, and YouTube video by YouTube video. There can be hours and hours of memes and videos demonstrating the arc of good things and truth, but it won’t matter because all someone has to do is go on TV and deny it and point to some nebulous bad thing somewhere over the horizon. A history of proof can be erased in a moment. But the truly nutty thing is all of these things simply paralyze us. We not only don’t know what to believe, but we’re not really sure which ideas we should align ourselves with. We aren’t really sure what positions we should take and we, well, don’t do anything (or the natural things which would enhance the probability of good things happening). And into this vacuum steps people who want power. Which forces me to circle back to the concept of inflicting damage. If you pursue power in today’s environment, your pathway to power isn’t to offer hope, but rather to inflict damage on the enemy.
Yeah. The nuts bringing up the recession aren’t bringing up recession to solve it, but rather to blame someone and inflict damage on them. That’s nuts.
I find the recession discussion a bit nutty with stable household income, high(ish) consumer spending, and good business investment data. This isn’t to suggest if you have a 401k you may not want to look at it for a bit, but I think the recession talk is a bit nuts. But maybe I’m nuts. Ponder.