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Agreed. Something odd is going on as well, where under Trump financial analysts are talking about "rising unemployment" when unemployment is lower than it literally ever was under Obama. Unemployment has only very rarely been lower than it currently is.
I think this is a big part of this dynamic, and also the dynamic of the American Left as a whole from the Clinton third way era to today. 1990s Gen X anti-establishment thinking was built around rejecting boring mainstream corporate jobs and the evil corporate bosses they served. Enter Google, with its "Don't be Evil" corporate catch phrase, and a thousand start-ups followed the same logic. Infinite PTO, beer carts on Friday, ping pong tables and nap rooms! The tech companies were just as against the soul-sucking corporate bullshit of Halliburton or GE as you were! Google, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, et al were understood as left-wing Obama-voting humanistic champions against the traditional corporate world.
The development of those tech companies into new kinds of corporate villains, and the failure of the Obama administration to deliver on much of anything beyond reasonably competent middle-of-the-road governance, lead significant portions of the young to turn a lot more radical. Whether it's pseudo-marxist anti corporatism or hard-right tradcath fascist anti-capitalism, the common factor is the disillusionment of realizing that new hip tech companies weren't going to fix everything. No capitalist corporation is going to fix everything.
As someone who had the misfortune to graduate during the Obama years and currently in the line to try and find a new job right now, you will have to excuse me if I so politely reply with bullshit.
Trying to find a job under Obama that wasn't some sort of high-turnover high-pressure sales job was a complete nightmare that I barely managed to stumble into through a series of unusual circumstance. (And, checking back what the average for my degree was at the time, I was getting severely underpaid for it).
Right now, it's arguably even worse; throwing out applications for even slightly sketchy jobs, and I'm not even getting replies back for an interview.
Back during Obama, I couldn't even count the times I'd get slotted in for an interview only to get in and find they were interviewing me for something completely different, or had just straight up lied about what I was applying for. Good times.
If anything, those financial analysts sound like the only people who know a goddamn inkling of what they're talking about. I'd listen to them, if I were you.
Sorry but what in tarnation are you talking about? What point are you trying to make here? I'm totally lost.
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True. It is, however, rising. And as far as I can tell, every other slight rise of unemployment has been followed by a sharp rise (and recession) -- 2007, 2001, 1979, 1974, maybe 1960. That's technical analysis and technical analysis is BS, but it's tempting. I also suspect some of the doom and gloom talk has been attempts at stock market manipulation; e.g. talk of AI bubble and how we were in a recession if you didn't count AI was reaching a crescendo and then NVidia reported great earnings (entirely predictable since even if there is a bubble it manifestly hasn't popped yet).
I feel like we've worked through several technical explanations for why a recession is due since 2021 and each has come and gone, and what it comes down to is that it's due and everyone knows it. The biblical theory of economics that there are seven fat years and seven lean years is in most cases as good as any. The identity of Mrs O Leary's cow or the Austrian crown prince that sets it off is ultimately unimportant, the line can't go up forever without going down.
We've had two quarters of negative GDP growth since then. We've gone about 10 years without a recession in the past (1991-2001 and 2009-2019) and we're only 5 years into the current growth period. The doom-and-gloom seems unshakable though. As I said, some of it might be manipulation, either market or political. Holiday travel is way up this year, which seems to me to be an indicator of positive sentiment. Holiday shopping has been predicted to be below-trend this year. If that plays out we probably are headed for recession. If it doesn't, I smell a rat.
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