“A recession is when you hear about your neighbor losing their job, a depression is when you lose your job.”

And anxiety in between

You cut it before the punchline: "...and a recovery is when Jimmy Carter loses his job".

Well, technically, it's only a recession if it comes from the Rècession region of France.

What OP is referring to is called bubbly fiscal agony.

too many pour decisions!

Orange juice, milk, water... I just don't know which one!

cool aid

This make me spit all my coffee.

I would buy you another cup of coffee to replace it, but money is a little tight these days...

Have my humble upvote good sir or madam. A good day to you!

Times are getting so tough that people are stealing jokes [0].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33283106

This joke is widely adapted and reused, though. You could basically call it a meme format at this point.

I understand the joke, but I wonder... what's the instance that made it popular?

Relax buddy, it's a meme [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme

Oh it's definitely a meme. My reply is also a meme. We're just having fun.

Some would say a well-documented and evidence-supported meme is no meme at all.

Some would say 1 + 1 = 3.

Oh damn, that was good. The actual citation is what threw me, well done.

I ain't your buddy, friend.

Good jokes should be repeated

Yeah this was fantastic. Let them have cake!

I wish HN had awards like Reddit, I would spend coin on this comment. I got a much-needed proper belly laugh from it. :)

I think the implied question was "It isn't affecting me, here is the data I see around myself. That data is incongruent with the headlines, can you offer an explanation and show me what I am missing?"

And the answer is if someone surveys the inside of an office, they'll report very high employment rates.

The world is large and diverse. To understand it, one has to look at statistics. Looking at people runs in to hard limits very quickly, because it is only possible to see people who are in the same place as the viewer.

That's a generous interpretation. I think someone capable of negotiating themselves a new tech job at higher pay could only be asking this question rhetorically and not because they are incapable of answering it themselves.

The internet commenter's fallacy: I can only interpret things that happen to other people through things that have happened to me.

To some degree, this is just the human condition, but it is especially common (and annoying) in internet comments.

I think something about not being face to face makes people prone to think of your fellow commenters as an abstraction, and to interpret the ways their experiences differ as from yours as their misunderstanding rather than your not having that set of experiences. I'm aware of this, and am often able to catch myself and reflect further before hitting send, but will still observe this if I look over my past comments.

We aren’t in a recession yet.

Companies are starting to see the slowdown, so they are taking preemptive action so as earnings contract, P/Es will hold up better.

The politically minded readers of Hacker News refused to listen to those who said 2 quarters of negative GDP doesn’t necessarily mean a recession.

It would be really nice if we could take a deeper dive into economics, markets, etc and all learn but …

Has there ever been a recession so widely accepted and talked about before it kicked in?

I mean that honestly; I know there's a downturn and it'll probably continue, but my instinct is that something so widely talked about and accepted will probably not be as bad as it seems. Again I have no proof and maybe my instincts are totally wrong, but that's the feeling

It's very common for recessions to be widely talked about before they happen. I first heard talk about the upcoming housing bubble burst in 2003, five years before the bubble actually burst.

"Economists have predicted 9 of the last 5 recessions" - Paul Samuelson

> I first heard talk about the upcoming housing bubble burst in 2003, five years before the bubble actually burst.

2006 is when the housing bubble was pierced. It took another couple of years to fully deflate, so bursting isn't likely the best depiction of the event, but typically when we talk about bubbles bursting we refer to the first moment of weakness, not the tail end.

It was the securities market that crashed fast and hard five years later. The housing market crash played a role in that happening, I'm sure, but isn't housing itself.

I first learned what 'no doc' loans where in 2004. I worked inside a mortgage company for a while, and was a bit shocked by some of the numbers I saw. BUT... I don't think a housing bubble/crash was a foregone conclusion in 2003/2004, but warning signs were there and got louder over time.

The housing bubble occupied the front cover of the economist several times in 2004.

> I mean that honestly; I know there's a downturn and it'll probably continue, but my instinct is that something so widely talked about and accepted will probably not be as bad as it seems. Again I have no proof and maybe my instincts are totally wrong, but that's the feeling

Pretty much the center of opinion in mid-2006 was that the housing market was in a "slowdown" but that any recession would be brief, talk of "soft landings" and everything else. Everyone could see that it was rolling over, but there was a lot of optimistic talk about it.

Your opinion here is almost exactly the opinion seen 6-12 months before a strong recession.

There was some discussion of a contraction/recession due to the spike in commodities around 2014 by economists, but that never quite developed into a broad common opinion that a recession was due. And there was no Fed rate hike cycle starting then (since the Fed knew that inflation that was confined to commodities would be its own tax and brake on the economy, in the absence of other measures of inflation taking off).

Will we be in a recession on November 9th?

According to the general definition of a recession - two consecutive quarters of negative gross domestic product - the U.S. entered a recession in the summer of 2022.

And we left the recession in Q3?

https://www.bea.gov/data/gdp/gross-domestic-product

Probably depends on whether it stays up or not. See here: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A191RL1Q225SBEA

7 of the 12 recessions marked on the graph temporarily jumped up then dropped back down during the recession.

A note though that the "2 quarters negative real GDP growth" has only ever been a rule of thumb that tends to fit (on that graph above, the dips below 0 outside of recessions only ever lasted one quarter). The official determination has always been made by NBER ( https://www.nber.org/ ), and how they determine it is more complicated (though AFAIK the details aren't public). I think it's too soon for them to make a determination on this one though, they make it while looking backwards, so these two quarters may yet become official which would maintain the pattern.

Perhaps, though this more of a response to "We aren’t in a recession yet" as this is an odd thing to say being just 1 quarter out.

Here's some actual data on hiring rate from LinkedIn:

https://economicgraph.linkedin.com/en-us/resources/linkedin-...

Looks like the hiring rate is down some since May but still quite positive. It's always been above 1% for the last two years, and reached a max of about 1.35% in June of last year. It is down 10.6% this October, compared to October of last year, but the actual variation in hiring rate is not huge. They break it down by industry, some industries have increased hiring, some have decreased it.

The "works on my machine" for the economic world.

So obviously what we need is docker for the economy

Which might look like Matrix downloads?

And any non random sample of a much larger population is almost certainly biased.

Same can be said in the reverse: "It is affecting me, so it does exist". Bias on both ends, qualitative data is often not reliable.

Last election: "If my social circle thinks we are going to win, then it is a given". Both share a pattern: a tech bubble (pun intended)

Some data (need more) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33453819

You are indeed correct. Much of the "data" I've seen here in support of the recession argument revolve around tech layoffs (and, of course, inflation), and when someone points out that real GDP grew and the unemployment rate is low, someone will respond by telling you how bad their neighbor in some tech city has it right now.

You didn't notice the use of statistics?

OP has a great point: most recessions have low job numbers (because of weak demand).

Speaking for the US: This 'recession' is weird because consumer demand is strong, job openings are high, the unemployment rate is near record lows, and GDP grew in the last quarter. So, to echo OP - what recession? A drop in the stock market does not a recession make.

It almost seems as if some quarters are willing a recession into being, but consumers are not having it. Granted the federal reserve is trying to curtail consumer spending to curb inflation, so I get why businesses would predict a recession. In all, it feels like the twilight zone.