> And yet despite those warning signs, there has been nothing even remotely resembling an economic crash yet.
Well... define "economic crash."
The outputs no longer correlate with the inputs. Is it possible it's "crashed" already? And is now running in a faulty state?
"Bad" is a judgment call. Trump approval ratings haven't dipped that far, so Congressional Republicans won't dare abandon him and there's not much political will for change.
It might change if we get into millions of foreclosures like the great recession and the pain really hits home. From what I can tell right now they're in wartime mode where they just need to buckle down until Trump wins and makes other countries pay for tariffs or something.
We're definitely not in a crash yet, but it does feel like we're the roller coaster just tipping over the peak: unemployment is rising for the first time in a couple years, there's basically no GDP growth apart from AI investment, and the yield curves look scary. The crash could be any second now, especially because tech earnings week is coming up and that could indicate how much revenue, or lack thereof, the AI investment is bringing in.
This is how I'm starting to view many of these things. It's just that the metrics we use to evaluate the economy are getting out of sync. For instance, if "consumer sentiment is at Great Recession levels", why do we need some other indicator to accept that there's a problem? Isn't that a bad thing on its own?