Gamers, I have a feeling we are officially in an economic depression. In the past two weeks three tech giants (amazon is the new one) have implemented massive layoffs. The headlines will try to lie to you. Do not trust them. They will never admit there is a problem.
Oh man, time to talk economics for the first time on Cohost! I'm sure this will go well.
Anyway - so, technically, we're not even officially in a recession yet. Mostly because the recession metrics are hilariously bad - you have to have two straight quarters of negative GDP growth. That is... a hard bar to meet, mostly because of how the GDP is calculated. I'll spare you the gory details, but it's weighted heavily toward stock prices and paper-growth and not at all reflective of actual ground economic conditions. (Every metric like this has been this way since the 90s - they essentially made sure we'd never see scary numbers like the 70s again.)
But the fact is, most economists that don't have their heads up their asses (read: anyone not working for mainstream US journalism or the Fed...basically anyone with actual credibility) can tell you that we're basically in an artificial bubble - Bailouts and PPP loans and other Covid protection measures meant that a lot of companies did things like stock buybacks and cash hoarding - they're sitting on extreme artificial highs, which gives the impression of growth in the data even when the consumer market is falling apart. This is why the news is like "The economy is great!" while you're paying double for groceries and everything else has gone up 10-30% - consumer goods aren't factored in heavily to economic numbers thanks to those changes in the 90s.
If you account for the artificial bubble and adjust back to 80s methods of calculating - we've been in a recession for two years already, and we're definitely entering depression territory, almost universally.
Right now the unusually strong jobs market and success in tech have been almost all that's holding the economy afloat. With tech stocks dropping like a meteor this quarter and mass layoffs incoming, plus the impending death of Twitter (and very likely Facebook too unless Zuck pulls a miracle), tech is going to fall apart - and nothing short of a wartime economy will keep us from a true depression.
...that last point is probably relevant.
Gods help us all.
Yeah if there's one thing I remember from Econ 101 its that the GDP calculations (pretty much all the methods) are not grounded in reality.
