Free Republic

Prior to the current recession, the deepest post-World War II economic downturn occurred in the early 1980s. According to the accepted arbiter of the economy’s ups and downs, the National Bureau for Economic Research, a brief recession in 1980 — lasting only six months — and a short period of growth, were followed by a sustained recession from July 1981 to November 1982.The unemployment rate hovered between 7% and 8% from the summer of 1980 to the fall of 1981, when it began to rise quickly. By March 1982 it had reached 9%, and in December of that year the...

President Donald Trump declined to explicitly rule out a full-blown recession for the U.S. economy this year, telling Maria Bartiromo in a recent "Sunday Morning Futures" exclusive that the country will see a "period of transition" as his policies take effect. "I hate to predict things like that," he said of a recession. "There is a period of transition because what we're doing is very big. We're bringing wealth back to America. That's a big thing… it takes a little time, but I think it should be great for us." The president's comments come amid some business leaders' instability concerns...

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said he’s hearing a deluge of complaints from business leaders in Kentucky about the potential impact of Trump’s trade policies on the local economy. “I have every major industry in Kentucky lobbying me against them: the cargo shippers, the farmers, the bourbon manufacturers, the homebuilders, the home sellers — you name it — fence manufacturers,” Paul told The Hill. “The bourbon industry says they’re still hurt from the retaliatory tariffs” during Trump’s first term, he said. “So do the farmers.” He said the federal government had to pay $20 billion to $30 billion in the “last...

It may not seem so to some, but many Americans are struggling. While the S&P 500 has delivered eye-popping returns over the past two years, workers have been increasingly pinched by inflation, and job losses are becoming increasingly common. As a result, consumer confidence has plummeted, casting a big shadow over what could happen to the U.S. economy next. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, a stock market veteran trained by legendary hedge fund manager Stanley Druckenmiller, has watched the economy's give-and-takes for decades. Recently, he offered up thoughts on the U.S. economy's future that are likely to raise eyebrows. Challenger, Gray,...

Mark Cuban warned the federal government's abrupt and deep cuts are having spillover effects across the economy, eventually leading to a downturn. The latest jobs report showed solid gains, but it pointed to early effects of DOGE cuts and didn't capture the wave of layoffs that have come more recently. Meanwhile, Wall Street is pricing in greater odds of a recession.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said Sunday that Americans should “absolutely not” brace for a recession as President Donald Trump plans to implement far-reaching reciprocal tariffs on goods from foreign countries. “There’s going to be no recession in America. ... Global tariffs are going to come down because President Trump has said, ‘You want to charge us 100%? We’re going to charge you 100%,’” Lutnick told NBC News’ “Meet the Press.” Lutnick argued that Trump plans to “unleash America out to the world” and “grow our economy in a way we’ve never grown before.” “So, if Donald Trump is bringing growth...

Tesla’s Empire CRUMBLES: Sales Crash & Owners Run For Their Lives - (in Europe too) Rev Nation Tesla is in serious trouble. Sales are plummeting across the globe, with shocking declines in key markets like Europe, Canada, and the United States. Once the undisputed leader in the EV market, Tesla is now facing stiff competition, political backlash, and declining consumer confidence. Here’s the latest sales data: 🔹 United States: Tesla sales rose 14% in February 2025 to around 42,000 vehicles, but market share dropped to 44% in 2024, signaling major challenges. 🔹 Global Sales: Tesla delivered 495,600 vehicles in Q4...

The GDPNow model estimate for real GDP growth...in the first quarter of 2025 is -2.8 percent on March 3, down from -1.5 percent on February 28.

For some time, monthly consumer retail spending reports from the Census Bureau have had a touch of amazement about them. Many would strong economic growth would be spread close to evenly across each wealth class. However, according to a Moody’s Analytics analysis of Federal Reserve data, the bustling economy is not a story of all consumers spending shoulder-to-shoulder. Instead, according to The Wall Street Journal on Moody's numbers, the tale is of how statistical distributions are always critical in looking at data.The top 10% of earners — households making $250,000 a year or more — are responsible for 49.7% of...

Being a tariff man may come with some consequences for the US economy. That's the warning from former Trump communications director and Skybridge Capital founder Anthony Scaramucci. "I don't think this sort of blanket approach is the right way to do it, and I think he's [Trump] is going to put us into a recession, frankly," Scaramucci told me at the Bitcoin Investor Week conference. "Remember tariffs are a tax, and they're primarily a consumer tax," Scaramucci added. It's "a consumption tax, sort of like a VAT [value-added tax]. And that’s a regressive tax. So what ends up happening is...

US corporate bankruptcies hit their highest level since the 2008 financial crisis - as Americans tighten their belts. Companies have also incresingly been grappling with high rising debts - driven by high interest rates that caused borrowing costs to spike. In 2024, 686 companies filed for bankruptcy, up 8 percent from 2023 - and almost more than 2021 and 2022 combined. It also marks the most filings since 2010, according to data from S&P Global Market Intelligence. In addition last year, more companies tried to avoid bankruptcy through out-of-court actions, with these efforts outnumbering actual bankruptcies two to one, according...

Argentina has come out of a deep recession in a major victory for the country’s unorthodox President Javier Milei, who has spent the past year enacting sweeping — and painful — reforms in Latin America’s third-largest economy. Gross domestic product grew 3.9% in the July-to-September quarter compared with the previous three months, Argentina’s statistics agency said Monday. The agriculture and mining sectors drove the expansion, with consumer spending also growing strongly. But manufacturing and construction suffered sharp declines in output. The news of the economic rebound comes a year after Milei was elected on a ticket to tackle chronic hyperinflation...

The number of job openings in the United States has been “falling off a cliff”, and that is a major red flag. The last four years have been an economic nightmare for most Americans, and that is one of the primary reasons why Donald Trump won the election. But as we approach 2025, things are starting to get frighteningly bad. When the number of job openings in the U.S. drops by 2 million or more, that normally signals that we are either in a recession or that one is about to happen. Well, as you can see from this chart...

The entire improvement of the labor force since 2021 came from foreign workers, and the employment-to-population and labor force participation ratios remained significantly below 2019 levels. Real wages were stagnant in the past four years using official figures. Investment was weak, and the Russell 2000 index, which includes the top small-cap companies generating most of their business in the US, reflected an insignificant 1.8% sales growth and no real earnings growth between 2021 and November 2024.

Many have questioned the accuracy of official inflation statistics, with dozens of academic papers written on the topic and doubts voiced by sources ranging from the New York Times1 to former President Donald Trump. This matters not only because of the political salience of rising prices, but also because official inflation numbers are used to calculate real economic growth by adjusting nominal dollars to inflation-adjusted dollars. In this study we aim to quantify some of the more egregious biases in inflation statistics in order to get us closer to a true understanding of inflation since 2019, hence of true economic...

Consumer confidence in September suffered the worst decline in more than three years, dragged down by a weaker labor market and rising pessimism about future business conditions and incomes. The Conference Board on Tuesday said its index of U.S. consumer confidence fell to 98.7 in January from 105.6, near the lowest of the range for the index over the past two years. Economists had expected a slight decline to 103 from the preliminary estimate of 103.3 for August. Increasingly pessimistic expectations for the economy’s performance in the months ahead and a weaker labor market drove September’s confidence decline.

Will the U.S. economy be able to beat inflation without going into a recession? That may be the question investors are asking themselves as more economic data is pointing to a softening economy. Recession fears started to percolate in early August, when July jobs data showed the unemployment rate growing to 4.3%. The increase in unemployment triggered the recession-indicating Sahm rule and a deep stock-market selloff over the next two trading days. “The unemployment rate is increasingly more of a watch point for investors,” Matt Stucky, chief portfolio manager of equities at Northwestern Mutual Wealth Management, told MarketWatch. Although the...

LL Flooring - previously known as Lumber Liquidators - is shutting all its stores after going out of business after three decades. The retailer, one of America's biggest flooring suppliers, was looking for a buyer after filing for bankruptcy. Earlier in the summer it had 442 stores, but shut nearly 100 as it looked to cut costs and woo investors. No buyer could be found. In a letter to customers yesterday, bosses said: 'It is with a heavy heart that we must let you know that we are going to begin the process of winding down the business and closing...

Left-leaning media outlets like MSNBC are doing their best to protect Vice President Kamala Harris from scrutiny. As Ben Shapiro has been so keen on pointing out these last few weeks, it’s been nearly 30 days since Harris became the de facto Democrat nominee, and not once in that time has the media asked her an adversarial question. The media, which once loathed Harris, has provided nothing but glowing coverage of her. It hasn’t pushed her to lay out her policy proposals or explain how her new administration would be any different than the disastrously unpopular one she is currently...

The six one-offs that drove growth and pulled the global economy out of bubble-bust recessions for the past 30 years have all reversed or dissipated. Absent these one-off drivers, the global economy is stumbling off the cliff into a deep recession without any replacement drivers. Colloquially speaking, the global economy is toast.Here are the six one-offs that won't be coming back:1) China's industrialization.2) Growth-positive demographics.3) Low interest rates.4) Low debt levels.5) Low inflation.6) Tech productivity boom.Cutting to the chase, China bailed the world out of the last three recessions triggered by credit-asset bubbles popping: the Asian Contagion of 1997-98, the...