Can we stop all this recession talk, please? It 's bringing us down.
As in, literally: fretting too much about the next Great Recession can contribute to the arrival of same.
When stocks plunge, the mood of most on-air experts plunges, too.
On cable news, this creates a competition among pixel pundits to make the darkest predictions for "How Bad Can It Get?" as I wrote in The Wall Street Journal on March 18, 2018.
Good thing no one watches TV news anymore.
I was an anchor at CNBC for the meltdown in 2008-09. The same boogeyman buzzwords are back — recession, inflation, and stagflation.
Plus new ones: supply chain, COVID, climate change, and Monkeypox.
The truth is we may avoid a recession entirely, or it's already on the fade.
In which case, stocks are cheaper now than they have been in several years.
Some hard data offer hope rather than despair. The Federal Reserve looks at job contraction as the most important indicator, and, right now, "Help Wanted" signs are everywhere.
We have almost two open jobs for every one person who is unemployed and looking for work: 11.3 million unfilled jobs at last count.
Consumer spending provides almost 70% of economic activity.
Signs of a sharp downturn are elusive at best: in May spending rose 0.2% to $32.7 billion from the month before, while personal income rose an even stronger 0.5% (to $113.4 billion for the month).
Anecdotal evidence is even more convincing.
In the past two months, I have visited Boca Raton, Florida, Brunswick, Georgia, Spartanburg, South Carolina — then back to Boca, then back home to Brooklyn, and then to Boston and back during a recent weekend.
Everywhere I went, business was booming, and "Help Wanted" signs were in abundance. People were out and about, happily unmasked and spending freely.
If a recession is nigh, consumers are ignoring it, blissfully. They want to rock.
In early June, at MetLife stadium in New Jersey, I attended a packed Coldplay concert stacked three decks high. People waited in line 30 minutes to buy $15 hamburgers.
A few weeks later, in Boca, my beachfront hotel was full up and my room rate was over $400 a night — and this was in the 90-degree heat of summer, the low season. In Brunswick, I stayed in a hotel that bustled with guests, with only one staffer running the whole thing.
On the drive north from there, we stopped at a Dairy Queen where the customer wait was a good 15 minutes. A sign taped to the front glass door revealed the owner’s frustration:
"We are short staffed. Please be patient with the staff that did show up. No one wants to work anymore."
In Spartanburg, the lunchtime crowd filled up every table at a grill, one established in 1960, where dozens of framed pictures clutter the wooden walls, and burgers are stacked half-a-foot high with triple beef patties.
And in Boston, on Friday and Saturday night, half a dozen restaurants I tried had open tables only before 5:00 p.m. or after 8:30 p.m.
For Sunday brunch, another eatery required an hour-plus wait.
People happily lined up for unshaded seating outdoors in the 94-degree heat.
Heading back to New York on Amtrak, recently on a Sunday — every seat was full.
A weary conductor announced, "One seat, one ticket, one person, please. This is a sold-out train. We’re shorthanded, we’re hot, so, please help us."
No other run-up to a recession has been like this one. We have pent-up demand from two years of COVID-19 lockdowns, and a surge in household cash from trillions in government aid.
All of this should give us reason for hope rather than dread, and this writer has been right on this in the past. On June 25, 2009, anchoring my own nightly show on CNBC, I declared the Great Recession was ending "right here, right now," and laid out a case for it in an 11-minute soliloquy.
Buy stocks, I advised then. One year later, the National Bureau of Economic Research, which decrees when past recessions began and ended, confirmed the end date as June 30, 2009.
Few people noticed back then: my ratings were low, and Michael Jackson died the same day. If I'm right this time around, the Federal Reserve’s latest 0.75% interest rate hike, the second in a row, may be the worst of it, and the bull market is ready to resume another run.
Dennis Kneale, @denniskneale on Twitter, is a writer and media strategist in New York. Previously, he was a senior editor at The Wall Street Journal, the managing editor of Forbes, and an anchor at CNBC and Fox Business. Read Dennis Kneale's reports — More Here.
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