What would it take for the U.S. to enter a recession?

[Fat Charlie]

So the money would immediately go to small businesses.

Pubs are perfectly legal tax paying ones, more and more weed dealers are becoming that every day. If we overwork the meth dealers they'll just blow themselves up cooking it more often. Sounds like win-win to me.

[oil pan 4]

Around here it would be bathtub meth dealers.
Most cooks blow them selves up trying to extract anhydrous ammonia, here its too easy to get.

[Xist]

According to It might feel like 2008, but here's how it's different we technically might not have a recession, "Assuming the number of cases peak in the next few months and abates by summer, [Diane Swonk, chief economist of Grant Thornton] says any downturn is likely to last six months or so."

They said the Great Recession was "set off by an overheated housing market."

According to this, the average home value peaked on 2006-11-01 at $216,003.80 ($275,038.77 in inflation-adjusted dollars). As of 2019-07-01, it was $271,768.42.

So, home prices may be as high, but it is entirely possible this is reasonable thirteen years later.

The article says that foot traffic to Walmart was down 16.5%, but was that nationwide or what?

A Walmart employee said that they were staffed for Black Friday and, as I mentioned elsewhere, their parking lot was packed yesterday.

Household debt was 134% of GDP in 2007 and Americans only saved 3.6% of their income.

It is 96% and 8% respectively now.

Nearly 9 million Americans lost their jobs in 2008. Unemployment more than doubled to 10%.

They say that it could go from 3.5% to 3.8 - 4.1%.

The Great Recession lasted 18 months. This may only last 6 months, which wouldn't qualify as a recession.

The economy contracted in five of six quarters during the slump, falling as much as 8.4% in late 2008.
Current crisis. Most economists expect the virus to shave growth by one or two percentage points over the next couple of quarters.

The stock market plummeted 57% in 2018. The S&P 500 has already dropped about one-third of that.

Corporations had $5.8 trillion in rated debt as of March 31, 2009[...]. Less than two-thirds, or about 65%, was investment grade, which ratings agencies determined was highly likely to be repaid.

Corporations had $9.3 trillion in rated debt in 2019, [... b]ut a higher percentage of corporate debt today is considered to be investment grade at 72%.

However, they say that situation is "clearly deteriorating."

They say that banks are in a much better situation now and should manage fine.

The Fed's rate was 5.25% in 2007 and they slashed to nearly zero. Right now it is between 1 and 1.25%, giving them a fraction as much room.

It says we shouldn't need anything like President Obama's stimulus bill.

Although prices have risen steadily in recent years, they’re just 22% above their peak. Homes aren’t overpriced, Faucher says. That means with mortgage rates low, housing can help offset troubles in the rest of the economy.

[oil pan 4]

Bernie or biden.
With biden you get the signature Obama "it's technically not a recession" economy, send US jobs to China. But it sure feels like a recession.
With bernie, it will be like this all the time, no toilet paper, no bread, no baby food then eventually no food, no jobs.

Obamas stimulus package turned out to be a Chinese stimulus package. When the checks dropped Walmarts sold out of flat screen TVs.

[rmay635703]

Seems to me we never left the recession

[oil pan 4]

Depending on how you want to chop up the demographics top 2 reasons I can find for all ages are the massive numbers of baby boomers who have retired for good and for ages 25 to 55 it's supposedly due to increased numbers of people with criminal records getting under the table work and aren't counted as the labor force.

[Natalya]

Originally Posted by oil pan 4

Bernie or biden.
With biden you get the signature Obama "it's technically not a recession" economy, send US jobs to China. But it sure feels like a recession.
With bernie, it will be like this all the time, no toilet paper, no bread, no baby food then eventually no food, no jobs.

Obamas stimulus package turned out to be a Chinese stimulus package. When the checks dropped Walmarts sold out of flat screen TVs.

Looks like all it took was a virus and we ran out of toiler paper, bread, and all the jobs got cancelled with Trump.

Things sure do move fast.

[JSH]

A recession is 2 quarters of negative GDP growth. It really is as simple as that.

1Q2020 will be negative. 2Q2020 looks like it will be much, much worse. We are likely in a recession right now but it won't be officially declared until July 2020.

How long it will last depends on how well the world and the US government reacts to the current crisis. So far it isn't looking good. We squandered 2 months of advanced notice that this was coming. There still isn't a coherent plan of what we will do, how we will distribute needed resources, how we will keep companies and more importantly people financially afloat going forward. Right now there is no coordinated response and it is left to every State, City, Company, Individual to try to muddle through the best we can.

This morning I watched the head of FEMA tell states to buy any medical supplies they can on the open market. It really is everyone for themselves.

[oil pan 4]

The difference is this time people had enough money to buy all the food in the store.
China knew about this in the middle of November.

[serialk11r]

Originally Posted by oil pan 4

The difference is this time people had enough money to buy all the food in the store.
China knew about this in the middle of November.

No they didn't, the November 17th was retroactively estimated through testing done later. https://www.livescience.com/first-ca...rus-found.html

Doctors first suspected a new disease late December. It takes more than one case of pneumonia to suspect a new bug is going around.

It's very important people remember the timeline correctly to judge their own government's response and how it should have been different if at all for future improvement. December 31st is when the WHO was notified about a new virus, January 7th is when the genome was sequenced, and lab proof of human to human transmission was January 20th. Those are the dates from which response time should be measured.

From what I've read, January 7th should've been the moment where everyone around the world should've gotten at least some test kits and protective gear production ready (highly probable that the virus is infectious), and somewhere before the 20th, someone should have looked at the ramp up in pneumonia cases and decided all large scale gatherings in Wuhan should've been cancelled. Losing 1 week like that translated into about 5x the cases.

Border closure to China on Feb 1st should've also come with mandatory fever screening for all arrivals from anywhere, regardless of residency/citizenship status. At the time, it was unknown that asymptomatic carriers were so widespread, but symptomatic carriers were allowed to walk in.

The moment community transmission was detected in Italy and the US, that should've been the signal to quarantine every single arrival from outside and lock down every big city, given Wuhan hospitals were already overrun and deaths skyrocketing. Italy's early cases were imported from Germany, not China. A lot of visitors to Italy imported the virus into the US.

And unfortunately it is absolutely necessary that the government proactively and forcefully takes these measures. Word about a new disease was spreading on the internet since the last week of December, yet here we are in late March and there are still idiots running around crowded public places. The longer there are any people in non-compliance with quarantine measures, the longer the economic pain lasts.

Applying 20/20 hindsight the way you did doesn't make the future response better.