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Posted
1 hour ago, Nice Guy Eddie said:

I can't imagine most people are buying cars unless they have no choice.

I think you underestimate how catastrophically stupid most people are when it comes to money, cars, and debt.

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Posted
15 hours ago, ChickenSandwich said:

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I guess some credit is deserved. This is the closest you've ever come to making a substantive response when shown IDENTICAL conduct by the party you unwaveringly support

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Posted

Listening to an economics webinar hosted by UCLA, a few key take-aways

  1. hiring is down
  2. capex is on hold because of uncertainty
  3. inventory levels down before Christmas season
  4. 77% of companies have passed on tariffs to consumers
  5. domestically produced items are raising prices even if they aren't directly affected by tariffs

 

The word UNCERTAINTY over tariffs, interest rates, policy comes up over and over again.

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Posted

Should have mentioned, the webinar is more focused on small and mid-sized businesses.

Summary from the panelists:

  1. Shocks from policies - tariffs, immigration
  2. Concern and apprehension because policies keep changing, however, policy "pauses" have allowed small businesses to navigate
  3. Fewer regulations is helping businesses
  4. Job growth is significantly lower
  5. Recession is imminent, or already underway
  6. Slight disagreement by panelists on tariffs...
    1. 60% of tariffs is passed to consumers
    2. 20% of tariffs is absorbed by companies
    3. 15% of tariffs is absorbed by foreign manufacturers
  7. Inflation according to government sources is 2.6%
  8. Inflation forecasted to be 3.3% by 2026 Q1.
  9. Construction has jobs that aren't being filled (really?)
  10. Small business owners are being affected most by tariffs because cash flow doesn't allow for stocking up of inventory
  11. Surprisingly small business are mostly optimistic - small business owners are generally optimistic (or else they wouldn't open their own business)
  12. Small businesses have seen worse during 2008 financial crisis and covid.
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Posted
4 minutes ago, Superhero said:

Recession is imminent, or already underway

Talking head on CNBC was saying this AM that the US has been in a "rolling recession" for the last few years and that we are headed out of the rolling recessions into another bull market.  Who knows.

A lot of the bullets you have listed sync with my personal experience.   Pretty much been total chaos this year...will the tariffs really start to bite?  who knows.

Posted

Most recent podcast from Mark Zandi at Moodys went through they numbers of how it’s the top 20% of earners doing all the spending. Bottom 80% are negative. His group thinks the overall economy will muddle through, meaning low to no growth for a while but not “official” recession. But they also think the bottom 80% of earners are living a very real recession all the way. K shaped economy they call it. 

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Posted
14 minutes ago, tbone_ said:

Most recent podcast from Mark Zandi at Moodys went through they numbers of how it’s the top 20% of earners doing all the spending. Bottom 80% are negative. His group thinks the overall economy will muddle through, meaning low to no growth for a while but not “official” recession. But they also think the bottom 80% of earners are living a very real recession all the way. K shaped economy they call it. 

K shaped seems 100% accurate. living in two worlds side by side in more than just political ways, also economic ways. politics aside, it's a powder keg imo.

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Posted
44 minutes ago, scramblyn said:

K shaped seems 100% accurate. living in two worlds side by side in more than just political ways, also economic ways. politics aside, it's a powder keg imo.

We have a greater degree of wealth inequality right now in the US than the French did when they broke out the guillotines, so yeah I'd agree it's a bit of a powder keg situation.

What's wild is that around 75% of corporate profits have been funneled into stock buybacks (source) which I believe is STRONGLY motivating the K-shaped recession. After the 2017 TCJA that only worsened. There's money for the poors, it just hasn't seemed to trickle down yet 🤔

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Posted
On 9/25/2025 at 3:41 PM, tbone_ said:

Most recent podcast from Mark Zandi at Moodys went through they numbers of how it’s the top 20% of earners doing all the spending. Bottom 80% are negative. His group thinks the overall economy will muddle through, meaning low to no growth for a while but not “official” recession. But they also think the bottom 80% of earners are living a very real recession all the way. K shaped economy they call it. 

I love his podcast but I disagree with him some on this. I am a in the top 20% and I feel it a little imo but more importantly I have just stopped spending. I go home now for lunch instead of going out to eat. Little shit like that adds up and I think many more are doing the same thing. 

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Posted
13 hours ago, Clintonaldo said:

I love his podcast but I disagree with him some on this. I am a in the top 20% and I feel it a little imo but more importantly I have just stopped spending. I go home now for lunch instead of going out to eat. Little shit like that adds up and I think many more are doing the same thing. 

I listen to Moody's and their guest, Heather Cox or something like that, was very much in the mindset of no recession but the middle class is totally turbofucked.  I think all of Zandi's panelists were unanimous that if the stock market sneezes shit will hit the fan bigly.

Posted
1 minute ago, Hefeweizen said:

I listen to Moody's and their guest, Heather Cox or something like that, was very much in the mindset of no recession but the middle class is totally turbofucked.  I think all of Zandi's panelists were unanimous that if the stock market sneezes shit will hit the fan bigly.

Yep. I love the podcast and they are all very smart and it’s obvious they aren’t a fan of the administration but they do a good job of trying not to bring it up. 

Posted
Just now, Clintonaldo said:

Yep. I love the podcast and they are all very smart and it’s obvious they aren’t a fan of the administration but they do a good job of trying not to bring it up. 

They are by and large excellent economists and eggheads.  They stay away from politics, but the stupidity of some of the policies can't be argued intelligently.  So it's pretty clear where they stand.  The H1B visa discussion was excellent and thought provoking.  I thin @Bozo_Casanovaput me on to this podcast and it's a Friday appointment to me now.  So much better than most of the shlock out there.

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Posted (edited)
On 9/27/2025 at 7:59 AM, Clintonaldo said:

love his podcast but I disagree with him some on this. I am a in the top 20% and I feel it a little imo but more importantly I have just stopped spending.

It’s a function of where the data comes from and who is in the top 20%.

First, a lot of these data come from reports organized into quintiles. So it’s no surprise that the people who are spending are in the top 20%, even if some or a lot of the top 20% isn’t spending much, like you.

Second- the top 20% contains a large number of baby boomers, who carry a lower debt load and pay less for housing than younger earners in the top quintile. The people who are spending at your income level may be older, life in a cheaper location, have a laid off house, etc.

Third, it matters a lot where you are in the top 20%, because spending is increasingly concentrated through the top of the top quintile. The top 20% does about 63% of the spendinG, but the top 10% accounts for 49% of the spending.

Those are both historic highs. 

Edited by Bozo_Casanova
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Posted (edited)
18 minutes ago, Bozo_Casanova said:

It’s a function of where the data comes from and who is in the top 20%.

First, a lot of these data come from reports organized into quintiles. So it’s no surprise that the people who are spending are in the top 20%, even if some or a lot of the top 20% isn’t spending much, like you.

Second- the top 20% contains a large number of baby boomers, who carry a lower debt load and pay less for housing than younger earners in the top quintile. The people who are spending at your income level may be older, life in a cheaper location, have a laid off house, etc.

Third, it matters a lot where you are in the top 20%, because spending is increasingly concentrated through the top of the top quintile. The top 20% does about 63% of the spendinG, but the top 10% accounts for 49% of the spending.

Those are both historic highs. 

The other side of that coin in the business world is that nearly all of the corporate CapEx spending that's been keeping the markets happy has been on GenAI data centers and buying Nvidia chips. There's not a path to profitability with the genAI business model, openAI is losing money per chatGPT session, and every business consuming their models is losing money on their products built on the LLM's.

It's gonna be one hell of a hangover when there's no real revenue to offset the capex depreciation in a year or two

Edited by Captainant
Posted
1 hour ago, Captainant said:

There's not a path to profitability with the genAI business model

Gonna have to go ahead and sort of disagree with you there Bob. But I do think is that it’s deflationary in the aggregate. 
Either way, however, none of that is really relevant to the point. 
Way back on the ca. 2020 Covid threads I said somewhere that I anticipated a rather rapid U shaped recovery,  driven by the same thing driving spending now,  despite everything: income inequality.
 

The top 3-4% of income earners have achieved exit velocity relative to the gravity that economic uncertainty and rising costs impacts everyone else. And that’s true for businesses as well. 

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