If you think that # is the end all be all of data confirming a recession then you are way behind the 8 ball. I dont want a recession, I dont want millions of people to suffer as they cant afford food and gas and barely pay their inflated mortgages and credit card bills but thats the reality of where we are headed as a nation. People losing jobs at an alarming rate isnt helping either. Without a job how are people going to pay for goods that are on the rise when they are maxed out on credit??
the front line; thats where it is felt first ( as limit is suggesting )...just as it trickles down; it most certainly trickles up as well during hard times...depending on the magnitude of things is how hard the shock-wave will be felt....and from seeing what the FED and the Gov. have done in the last few months just to shore this puppy up should tell you more or less the size of this mo-fo...peace
Things are actually getting pretty tight now on Wall Street. I am a software vendor to various broker/dealers and asset managers and the slowdown is certainly starting to hurt our bottom line. Mostly from the b/d side. I also know of other vendors dealing with the investment banking side and they got hit pretty hard as well in the last several months because very few new deals are being made, both in equities and fixed income. Half of my Bear Stearns contacts on LinkedIn just updated theirs profiles to unemployed. I hope that this is the last of it, but somehow I'd need to be a real moron to believe that.
Like 95% of your answers, you've given us yet another sweet non sequitur! Care to address the points people are making instead of deflecting the focus to some inane topic? You debate like a liberal--
I can't address your doom and gloom- you need a Psychiatrist for that. If you keep at it you become like it. How you " feel" is not the reality though. Have any numbers about your imaginary recession? Show us a single negative quarter of economic growth since 2002! Stop destroying those charts- stop killing your own goose- unless you want to end up with tin cup in hand and giving eye contact to motorists on a freeway ramp.
He can't answer the question on where the consumer is going to find the disposable income to keep the economy running smoothly because he DOESNT know. So he PRETENDS to not see certain posts because he cant answer it intelligently.
You can only find the negatives and positive are completely ignored. You fail to understand, why the market went up on a job loss and you failed to do due diligence with Technical Analysis. There is so much cash on the sidelines horded into 2-3 % paying accounts that is pouring back into stock and equities and fueling fires. Thanks to Feds for making these morons invest wisely. The same cash will go into real estate buying and when the frenzy starts after a pent up demand held back several years. You think no one will buy real estate again?
Of course people will buy real estate again at some point. But it doesnt have to happen for some years. Who says it has to happen now or next year even?? Also, you arent thinking about the average american consumer who has been living paycheck to paycheck and also on their precious credit. Now, cost of living is going up and continueing to ascend. These poor saps have no more credit, jobs are being slashed and they cannot afford to live like they once did. And their valuable spending helped fuel and drive the economy. What about them? Where are they going to find money to spend on goods to keep America chugging along?
I asked you on 3/27 and then again on 4/2 why you didn't reply to my original post. Your silence says a lot! Keep focused on your "academic" definition of a recession. Others have enough intelligence to see where we're at. And still others may use a different defitition of "recession". Such as: A significant decline in activity spread across the economy, lasting longer than a few months. It is visible in industrial production, employment, real income and wholesale-retail trade. Recession is a normal (albeit unpleasant) part of the business cycle. A recession generally lasts from six to 18 months. Interest rates usually fall in recessionary times to stimulate the economy by offering cheap rates at which to borrow money. http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&postid=1857821#post1857821 I really find it amusing that people go into denial and hold onto losing positions. Meanwhile traders make $$$$.
I wonder if the president of the National Bureau of Economic Research is "imagining" the recession. I haven't read this entire thread, so I'm not sure if anybody has posted this yet: Whether the country is officially in recession is determined by the National Bureau of Economic Research, a private nonprofit research organization. The group considers several economic indicators, as well as the severity and duration of a downturn. The NBER says the most recent recession lasted from March 2001 until November 2001 and that the economy has been in "expansion" since then. The group typically does not declare a recession for anywhere from 6 to 18 months after its arrival. On Friday, the NBER's president, Harvard University economist Martin Feldstein, said we are in a recession, though it was not an official NBER declaration. http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2008/news/0803/gallery.economy_overview/ So who should I believe. Some guy on elitetrader, or the president of the organization that is responsible for officially declaring whether we are in a recession or not?