What OP is referring to is called bubbly fiscal agony.

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

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

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.

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.

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 …

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

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

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.

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).

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.

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

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.

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

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

Who knows, maybe the person who is supposed to update this got laid off.

But if you look on LinkedIn, Indeed, etc... these companies are still keeping job postings up and adding new ones all the time. It seems kinda fraudulent IMO

"We've got 1000 job openings right now! What are you looking for?"

Yet... I don't actually think even if they found 1000 perfect fits tomorrow they'd all be hired.

Ideally in a company one should have job ads all the time and if someone valuable drops CV only then reply - if you catch someone who is specialist and good burning couple thousands for an ad will still be worth it.

First they send your work home, and then they send it next door.

Corporate learned during COVID that the metro premium isn't worth it any more. These layoff announcements--which have always occurred in the shadows--have three purposes:

1. Shift jobs to cheaper locales. In the US, many metro jobs are being moved to cheaper locations like the midwest. Western European labor is also relatively cheaper. Work from home works for you and your boss. I live in Raleigh-Durham. Things are on fire over here. Google, Apple, Oracle, Microsoft, and Amazon are all hiring at a rapid clip. My fiance just finished her PhD in comp bio, and she has competing offers... but last I heard, biotech is dead and some other thing about long term R&D slowing down due to rate hikes (more on why I think this is nonsense later).

2. Off set the massive over-hiring. The rush of cash during COVID and record profits lured many companies into growth-mode-at-any-cost. While they still need the head count in many cases, people were willing to cut corners in hiring and project quality (i.e. does this really have returns to justify the investment) so a cull is needed. Think about crypto for example. I have a feeling a good number of companies are regretting jumping on the crypto NFT train right about now.

3. I believe companies and the media loudly communicate layoffs in part to reduce labor's negotiating power. I can't prove this, but it seems about right. In December, Facebook was struggling to hire. It was in the news. Right now, I'm sure many people are afraid to ask for more money, but I've managed to wring out 10-20% more than what's being asked for by recruiters despite what everyone is hearing.

I know people thinking this is all Fed induced, but you have to remember, the money that was spent during COVID hasn't gone anywhere. It's still circulating. Companies also borrowed record amounts of cash during ZIRP that's due in 30+ years. Many of these companies have returns in the 10-30% band. A bump to 4-5% is no where near enough to slow down business given how much cheap money was created.

For more evidence, go look at the start up raises. In a recessionary environment, VC would be completely dead. Yes, deal making has slowed and garbage companies can't find financing, but let's be real: those companies should have never existed in the first place.

I thought this was to make share holders happy. Fewer employees, more money for the owners. But to improve negotiation seems useful, too.

I'm quite sure they were realizing it before that. Here in Canada, Statistics Canada data was already showing stronger job markets away from the large urban areas during the mid-2010s, which continues today, and the 2016 census showed a meaningful decline in large urban areas with communities of 1,000-29,999 seeing the largest growth. The 'counter-urbanization' moment was already well underway.

It is fair to say that COVID sped things up. There was, and still is, a lot of friction involved in making that transition, but COVID no doubt provided a lot of grease.

Me too. Moved here 17 years ago. It's becoming far less a 'cheaper locale', much like many of the other formerly cheaper locales. Housing here is one of the areas still going up while other areas are cooling off, though I've just started seeing some cooling and price reductions in the past month or so. I'm not even sure what counts as 'cheaper' any more.

I'm genuinely curious, that sounds unreasonably low to me given what the housing market has done in the last few years. The triangle has a sprawl problem and it's only getting worse as most of the affordable housing is pushed further into the exurbs.

We talked to a builder in Youngsville about building - mid 2021. Had initially verbal priced at high 400s. They back a few weeks later with "it's gonna be mid 500s, to low 600s." We backed out. 3 months later they're listing spec homes - in the same sub with $350k homes built 2 years ago - for $900k+.

Can you get something for $150k that a single person might want to live in? Probably, but you'll be commuting a lot to get to the Triangle proper.

Compared to LA, perhaps, this is 'affordable', but it's really... been a problem here (and it seems all over) the last few years.

But beware, the universe is trying to move here.

In the 2000 crash it was still fairly easy to find a job if you could code. Even though the big tech companies of the time were doing mass layoffs and losing 95% of market cap.

Who knows what it will be like this time. But I wouldn't take layoffs at high profile publicly traded tech companies as an indicator of the whole market. In some cases these companies are still even hiring a few engineers here and there while doing layoffs.

So far as I can tell demand for software engineers may actually be slightly higher than it was a year ago in the larger market.

Personal anecdata: I lived in Silicon Valley in this era. It was awful. That was absolutely not true. I spent two years sorting papers for ~12 USD per hour ("temp worker"). Eventually, I gave up on SV and moved to New York City. I found a very good job in less than two months.

Random anecdote: One thing I remember moving from SF to NYC (in that era): Instantly lower quality of life. I know, I know, that was a long time ago! The weather in NYC is awful compared to SF. I could walk to supermarket without a coat for 11 months a year. And no endless police & ambulance sirens or loud garbage trucks! And housing was more expensive and much lower quality.

That's not the case. Engineers may not be as numerous but in each of the recent layoffs engineers were let go as well.

And of course, on top of that there's standard recrutiment scam of "oh, sorry, this position was just filled, but may I interest you with $WORSE_JOB_FOR_LESS_MONEY instead"?

No one is saying there is a recession currently but rather that is coming down the pipeline.

From a personal perspective: I would say though as a new employee of a company - hope that they have good revenue and that you have a protected role, prove your value quickly as typically new hires have a risky position if the firm is facing layoffs.

Dev immigration from Romania to Germany was big 10-20 years ago, but now, most Romanian devs these days, unless they get offers that go above six figures, aren't rushing to move to Germany as most take home dev wages have almost caught up, but the CoL and housing is way cheaper than in Germany. I think the push to remote work since the pandemic really convinced more US companies to double down on hiring remotely in Romania pushing wages up. I think it's similar in Poland.

From what I saw, they open a small office in Germany when they either want to tap some university/research institution or open a big office when they want to bring in (and low-ball) a lot of Indian/Turkish/non-EU devs who's goal is moving to the EU, as Germany is a popular immigration destination for non-EU devs rather than Romania or Eastern Europe which are less desirable immigration destinations (although that does seem to be changing slowly).

I think nobody is trying, but with the right salary I'd love to. Some acquaintances did something like this: they moved from France to Poland and have a salary that's locally really good. There's more companies that hire like that on the basis that a certain salary gets you further somewhere east.

During that cycle, the frothiness was led by the financial sector instead of the tech sector. The mega banks like Citi, JP Morgan, and Goldman had a lot of analogies to the FAANG tech giants today. During the bull run their market caps exploded, everyone thought they were geniuses to the point that the orgs started getting complacent, and they were scooping up people left and right paying huge total comp packages. The hedge fund explosion in the mid 2000s felt a lot like the VC and startup excesses of 2021. Money was sloshing around, and basically anyone could raise a ton of funding off a pitch deck with minimal due diligence.

All that being said by late 2007 there was major distress in high finance. The structured credit markets had already basically imploded, the banks knew they were facing major imminent losses, and hiring was basically frozen. But this didn't really affect the broader economy until about a year later. It took a while for the complex credit markets on Wall Street to really impact vanilla credit markets on Main Street. But just because it was slow, didn't mean the tidal wave wasn't massive.

I don't know if history will play out the same. But my point is recessions don't happen all at once. They typically take some time to really unfold across the entire economy. We can expect that there are "leading sectors" and "lagging sectors". Probably the sectors that were really the tip of the spear during the expansion phase are generally most likely to be the canary in the coal mine during the crash. And we know that tech has been responsible for a huge amount of growth in American over the past ten years. My guess is this is very unlikely to play out as "tech gets clobbered and everything else pulls through fine" just as 2007 was very unlikely to play out as "Bear Stearns collapses but the good times keep rolling".

There's no analogue to that highly leveraged dependence on rate-sensitive assets among the FAANG tech giants today. The FAANG companies are low-leverage, high-return monsters with an incredible 50+% average return on equity in 2021 and a low average debt-to-equity ratio of 1.8. (For comparison, in 2006 Bank of America had a return on equity of 15.6% and a debt-to-equity ratio of 9.8).

The open question is how much VC spending (this was how easy money flooded into tech) poured into compute and ad spending, how much will it pull back, and what share of FAANG's revenue was it.

When the top payers do layoffs and/or stop hiring, overall the max compensation you can get goes way down

Just as an example, Stripe who just did layoffs yesterdays, pays $450k a year for a senior software engineer. How does that compare to your recent 20% raise?

The tech sector in the U.S is definitely still hiring if you're a senior software engineer who's willing to make $200k. But lots of people got used to very high compensation, and some also depend on it with loans they took out, that cutting their compensation by 50% would make them go bankrupt

Countries at war are losing a large number of people (directly or indirectly). Even for those not involved directly, reduced trade makes some goods less available, and the alternative is more work needed on the buyers side (e.g., cannot buy gas, need to chop down trees manually). Limitation of available energy is a bigger driver for the transformation to renewables than any climate change fears ever were before, which requires a huge work force, which isn't available.

There are hundreds(thousands) of physical supply chains that are each different and which will react differently. The financial supply chains are incomprehensibly convoluted.

In short the economies will influence each other but no one knows when or how the US will be affected.

Other than 2 quarters of negative GDP growth - which was the common understanding until it became politically inconvenient.

If US growth had rebounded from -0.1% to +0.1%, I suspect partisan hacks’ positions would instantly reverse and we’d have republicans telling us that a tenth a percent is not really growth, and democrats yelling that technically it’s no different than +9% so there’s no recession.

Or maybe one metric is insufficient to judge an entire economy.

Unlike the 2008 recession that was a result is mismanagement in the financial sector, this recession is very much an intentional act of monetary policy.

https://theintercept.com/2022/11/04/federal-reserve-interest...

  > “We see today that there is a bit of a savings buffer still sitting for households, that may allow them to continue to spend in a way that keeps demand strong,” she said. “That suggests we may have to keep at this for a while.”

I’ve been reading about this cost of living crisis and recession since 2021, and still waiting for it to bite despite the media’s best efforts to kill confidence.

This is such an absurd statement I feel like it must be tongue-in-cheek.

It explains why few people are seeing a downturn with their own eyes in spite of what the media is telling us.

The cost of living has gone up a lot where I live, but myself and friends earn enough that the significant grocery and energy bill spikes have zero impact on us, but if we were on a lower income and already on a tight budget we would definitely need to be cutting back on any non essentials.

This is subjective - I'm basing this off of how much mail I remember seeing. I haven't ran numbers or anything like that.

My first job in 2001 involved running around trying to back up everyone's Outlook files and yeah, you see a lot of email.

The tone of this comment suggests a young'un who has never been face to face with a /var/spool/mail that is mounted over NFS because your supervisor worked at BAE in 1992 and it was SOP there for reasons that were never, ever, ever relevant in your shop of 14, but NFS didn't come up this morning so you're trying to figure out where the hell everyone's email went

And yes this is vaguebooking about my supervisor from 2001 (you know who you are)

Still, your anecdote here is much more interesting than all of the uninformed hot takes on this thread. Thanks for sharing, seriously.

It did shrink for two quarters in a row, Q1 and Q2 2022. Q3 went back up.

Here's a "Real GDP percent change" graph that makes it easier to see: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A191RL1Q225SBEA

Interestingly, according to a recent poll, most Americans believe the U.S. is now in a recession. That belief alone may be enough to make a recession a reality.

https://www.politico.com/f/?id=00000184-3674-ddd7-afd7-3ef41...

I'd be more focused on 10%+ inflation and the 0.x GDP growth rate forecasts, especially since these forecasts are known to be somewhat optimistic

> Just landed (3 months ago) on a job that pays me 20% more than the previous one.

Well that doesn't even cover the 20% food price increase and ~40% energy price increase

I bailed on a MAAMA job in the states to move back to Canada.

Salary expectations (and currency!) are generally lower here, but the job market itself is hotter than I've ever seen it here.

My theory is that USA tech companies are friendshoring like mad.

In other words, Canada is picking up the recoil from the trade war with China. Biz that used to go to China (or even India) is now going to Toronto.

And every time a US company looks at their bottom line, they will recall that, if they hire three hours north of Seattle, they'll get something like a 40%-50% discount on total comp, PhDs out the wazoo, and a convenient, well-funded federal immigration system.

It's a no-brainer. What kind of fool would start a business in a politically unstable disaster-country where some populist executive order could cut you off from your supply of H1Bs next year?

Your job is moving to Canada (or possibly Europe,) and if you're smart, you'll move with it.

https://ycharts.com/indicators/us_unemployment_rate

and we are not in a recession yet. Certainly some firms are looking at economic trends, concerned that rising interest rates will cause a recession, and laying people off preemptively. One might fear this could lead to a recession but I think if you lose your job today you are much better off than if you lose your job a year from now and the economy gets much worse.

Normal companies are still having a hard time hiring, I think FAANG companies are bloated and not terribly efficient because they tend to be monopolists who don't have competition that would force them to be lean.

People mistakenly look to the badly named FAANG for best practices for software development and management but if you think critically the truth is the opposite, actually they should be lumped together with Boeing, Epic, Cerner, Adobe, Microsoft, etc.

These are highly profitable because of monopoly concentration and can afford to hire a huge number of excessively paid developers and waste their time with Byzantine practices, assign them to work on dead-end projects, etc. Quality of their products is beside the point because people are going to use them no matter how bad they are.

You can imagine for yourself what will happen to a person who works in that kind of environment, but I think getting a person like that to contribute to a normal business is like getting a pig to fly.

Unemployment rates for the past 70 years with recessions marked: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE

Normal employers are struggling to fill positions at supermarkets, salt mines, medical device factories, hair salons, restaurants, bus companies and other firms in my area.

If you believe the business cycle is like "economy runs too hot and inflation is high, the fed pulls back and crashes the economy, the economy gradually grows back to full capacity" then the low unemployment is a sign you're at a particular point in that cycle.

People tend to confuse "recession" with some sort of "economic armageddon". But double digit % layoffs at some companies and pulling back hiring by 66% (by your estimates) at others is a pretty huge pullback, no?

Other than inflation, most of what we're seeing is just regression to the mean after a lot of shit went bonkers during the pandemic.

The "mean" for software jobs is still about the best sector job market the world has ever seen outside of the last two years of software jobs and 2005-era mortgage finance. Maybe early Iraq War oil exploration, but you had to move to the Dakotas or bumfuck West Texas if you wanted in on that.

I chose regime media so I can't be accused of providing fake news.

Jobs like ours which are providing the circuses will matter less when the breads disappear. The regime better hope that global warming does continue to provide a mild autumn and winter.

In the same time some colleagues left because they were picked by other companies offering 30% increase (and they are already on very good pay).

I get contacted by recruiters couple of times each week, although as some already mentioned this might not be a good indicator since interviewing might not lead to hiring.

If the "what recession" thesis is right, chances are this was just a price correction, where companies' values are adjusted based on non-infinite time horizons. Stocks may still drop a bit as this correction finishes and earnings some in, but they are equally likely to rise.

There's a chance that the fear mongers are right.

EDIT: More broadly though, we are not actually in a recession yet, it's just that there are numerous signs of an emerging global economic slowdown. It's difficult to draw any concrete conclusions about the state of the economy from traditional metrics such as asset prices, inflation, GDP, unemployment, etc, because years of loose monetary policy coupled with recent shocks such as the pandemic and the war in Ukraine have messed with those metrics.

One thing that's certainly happening in London is that there's hundreds of entry-level candidates fighting for only a handful of openings.

The industry has generally become more risk-averse. Hiring less experienced people is now extra risky, as it is a bet that they'll generate some value for the company before moving on for a higher salary elsewhere. Hiring juniors is a great long-term move, especially in a 0% rates landscape and when VC funding is plentiful but if you only have 12 months cash it's pretty hopeful.

This budget is now being used to hire safer, more predictable hires: seniors (know what you're getting into) and contractors (can cut them with 28 days notice or even less, no employment contract to complicate things)

> many companies went from having around 1000 job offers open in linkedin on a weekly basis to having now around a third of that.

But if we want to use labour as an indicator of recession for the sake of discussion, that's a rather substantial decline. Why is that not indicative of a recession? A recession is considered a decline in business activity and if businesses are now not seeing the activity to support two thirds of that prior activity, that seems like a meaningful decline to me.

I think tech will be strong for the next 100+ years, as we face more and more challenges that will need tech solutions. Such as climate change. People getting 300k+ a year to code (or the equivalent?) will come and go and generally be in pockets and driven by bubbles.

Covid was obviously a much smaller plague, but coupled with a lot of people retiring at once, it would probably give a modest boost to employee's bargaining power at the cost of GDP as a whole shrinking.

So I predict we'll see a period of shrinking GDP and shrinking inequality. Still technically a recession, and not great if you're investor class, but not really impacting living standards in an adverse way for the rest of us.

The financial collapse will likely come early next year, with CBDCs being promoted and offered as a way out of it.

A note of caution on LinkedIn though: number of open positions in LinkedIn (at least in the US) means squat. The amount of fake, deceiving, spammy, outright scammy job postings is such that I ultimately stopped using it altogether, Indeed was a bit more helpful but far from ideal as well.

The thing is that recessions start somewhere. They never hit the entire economy at once. This one started in the most highly-leveraged areas of the economy because the crisis that's brewing is all about money. More specifically, it's all about access to collateral that allows money to flow. That pipe is constricting by the day.

Sooner or later, the recession hits everyone.

Food and energy prices are up, but asset prices are down. Cash goes further today in some ways that in did last year this time.

Housing is one asset class that is dropping in price, but the increasing cost of borrowing is more than offsetting that decline.

He has a point, though. On a developer salary, the basics like food and gas make up only a small portion of one's income. It may be an increasing portion, but still just a portion. The remainder can buy more, depending on what you want to buy.

Housing is cheaper if you have available cash, it it isn’t if you need to borrow. The reason it costs more to borrow is because cash is more valuable now.

I'd gladly take a 20% raise with this inflation. I'm taking a pay cut, plus the inflation's reduction to real pay, plus rent will be going up at a rate outpacing inflation.

Also, I think this recession isn't so much caused by a lack of demand, but a lack of supply. Supply chains were disrupted by the Covid crisis, and now the Russian invasion of Ukraine is causing lots of other shortages. This is causing shortages in all sorts of industries, but apparently not so much in ours. Although I would have expected that the CPU shortages would have had some impact on us.

I have a feeling that we are in a similar situation economically. I've definitely noticed prices rising at the grocery store and my insurance premiums have gone up roughly 40%, even after shopping around for a better rate. I haven't made any claims or did anything that would make me a greater risk. I feel like people have mostly managed to absorb the inflationary pressure but I don't think it will last.

The inflation is rising, central banks in EU, UK (and US) are increasing rates to fight inflation (in a wrong way IMHO), energy prices are rising without a solution in the horizon, food prices have also increased considerably, small shops are closing, small businesses are struggling, but hey look, I switched jobs, got a 20% pay rise and can't understand why you're all complaining... :-(

Most central banks have decided to have a recession. The fact they haven't gotten it done yet just makes it a matter of time...

Congrats! Your are now the new person and will be the first fired when the recession hits!

There is a recession/depression coming and I am sorry to tell you your timing is awful. Hiring can be pretty much stable or increase until a recession hits.

Portable jobs, such as software, tend to remain in high-demand, because even if some companies are struggling, others are flourishing.

Niche-tied jobs have it harder, since they cannot jump industry so readily.

You are either very naive, were manipulated into this conclusion, or you are playing naive to spark discussion (which would actually be commendable).

One way to think of this is by splitting the economy into companies that make consumer goods, and those that make capital goods. For example, think of airlines, and Boeing.

When interest rates go up, airlines become more reluctant to buy new planes. The airlines may still have full seats, but things slow down at Boeing. Maybe they lay people off.

Capital goods companies are something like 40% of the economy. Higher interest rates hit them harder than they hit consumer goods companies. The layoffs often start there.

I think that's the mechanism (or at least part of it) where higher interest rates lead to unemployment and recession.

As I've seen a lot of offers coming up but at lower salaries than usual.

For that matter, an economy is always too complicated to usefully describe in a single word. They come up with broad terms like "recession" and give them rigorous definitions in order to get some kind of handle on it, but it doesn't reflect everybody's experience. In fact, it may not reflect anybody's experience: some will do worse, and some will do better.

The definition is "less total stuff getting done". Measuring "stuff" is already hard; defining how much "less" constitutes something to be worried about is even harder.

One common definition is "Two straight quarters of declining GDP". GDP isn't a great metric, but at least it's consistent-ish.

The US had one declining quarter of GDP, at the end of last year, and it's been up ever since. Europe as a whole has not had any negative quarters, though a few countries have.

GDP isn't a great metric, and others use a more complicated metric trying to get at how people and businesses feel: the price of goods, how much they earn, etc. GDP is supposed to be the aggregate of all that, but aggregates are misleading, in the same sense as "Mark Zuckerberg in a room full of poor people means billionaires on average". Sometimes it's useful; sometimes it isn't.

It's clear that inflation is up; that's good for some people (like people who owe debts, and can now sell their goods for more money to pay off those debts) and bad for others (those with money in the bank). None of it is where economists want it to be -- even the low unemployment figures mean something is off kilter. (Too many people employed means that people who would otherwise be doing something like training or hobbies or retired are dragged into working for some reason.)

In other words... the economy is what it is. If you're doing OK, fantastic. Others are not. Others are doing better. Overall, it's not a crisis, but worrying. There are signs that it will improve, as we get past the pandemic and start to treat the Ukraine war as a baseline rather than a downturn.

Does that help clarify at all? Or just make it more confusing?

Yeah, agreed, but i wonder how much of what will happen is more self-fulfilling prophecy, where a critical mass amount of people "feel lousy", and hence unconsciously push all sets of invisible levers of the economy which push the world/countires/companies into something closer to a recession. I'm going to call the global economy the "mopey teen economy"...because even if things are not "that bad", the consensus will make everyone feel like things are not so great. ;-)

    The threat is nearly invisible in ordinary ways. It is a crisis of confidence. It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation.

As always, there is a lot of politics: some people want the economy to feel bad, others don't. Today we have a lot more vigorous public square holding the same old discussions.

There's something obfuscatory about calling this inflation instead of what it fundamentally is: scarcity. I get that inflation means a price rise, but inflation is (or should be) fundamentally about monetary policy (devaluing money) rather than supply and demand.

It's difficult enough to condense prices into a single measure without distinguishing what causes what. All the economists want for that term is to say, "Here is a standard basket of goods, and here is the average price paid for it." Even that much is hard enough to do that it requires a government bureau to do the calculation.

It would add extra confusion to redefine the term "inflation" to refer solely to price changes caused by monetary policy rather than supply or demand. Economists are likely to continue to use the term to mean what they've meant by it for over a century.

but my point is that isn't the idea of "genuine" (like you said) inflation almost useless to say then? what's a fake rise in prices?

Is this right? I'm sure I was taught the labour force figure used in calculating unemployment figures doesn't include people like this

Economists expect a certain number of people to be looking for jobs and not finding them because they don't match what their local market needs. It's friction. If the rate dips too low, it suggests that employers are digging too deeply to find anybody, probably by raising salaries, and risks unbalancing the rest of the economy.

It's pretty consistently about 10% of GDP. Enough to have a noticeable effect: a 1% decline in GDP is an enormous deal, so if one imagined a 10% layoff through the tech industry it would be a real crisis. It's not that bad, of course.

It would be more worrying if it were an indicator of broader employment issues. Instead it seems to be specific to the Silicon Valley business cycle: a lot of growth with more hiring than really necessary, followed by an outsized contraction.

I get the impression that it's unlikely that Twitter employees will remain unemployed long in Silicon Valley, unless they want to take an extended break. Lots of places are looking to hire. It may be a step down, but right now unemployment just isn't a national issue. (Six million total unemployed sounds like a lot, but economists expect about 4% of the ~200 million American workers to be unemployed at any moment due to the inevitable friction of people not finding jobs instantly.)

FB is flailing, Goog is a nightmare to get hired at, as is Apple (because of their corp egos)... (ive been here and in industry for 26 years, I know these companies DNA well... they are age-ist egomaniacs... so if you dump 3500 twitter workers on the streets os san francisco... thats going to be a tough market. and with the likelihood that many are renters, in one of the most expensive cities in the US, outcomes will be grief.

Musk better give a good severance for the careers he's abt to kill - because he can afford to do so.

That is, I've borrowed money on my credit card. The interest rate could go up next month. But I've also borrowed money in the form of the fixed-rate mortgage on my house, and the interest rate isn't going up until I take out a new mortgage to buy a different house.

The federal government borrows money in a bunch of time spans, from 3-month notes to 30-year bonds. The 30-year bonds are sensitive to what people think the interest rates are going to do over the next 30 years, not to what the interest rates do this month.

Because of WMDs we ought never see another war between nuclear/bio states. Ukraine doesn't matter and isn't what the war is about.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China%E2%80%93United_States_tr...

Western europe is probably going to be one of the best places to be.

But more importantly, the layoffs aren't obvious. Stripe layoffs is the current one in the HN list.

https://stripe.com/en-au/newsroom/news/ceo-patrick-collisons...

But check out the 7 pages of jobs they are still hiring for: https://stripe.com/jobs/search?skip=600

Its not layoffs in the economic sense. It's layoffs in the war sense.