More than half of Americans — 56% to be exact — believe the United States is in a recession, according to a new Harris Poll. And all of those people are wrong.
Clearly, we are not in a recession by any official measure. And other statistics confirm that assessment, was a recession, with spiking unemployment, and negative GDP. The more recent decline amid the COVID-19 shutdown was brief, and quickly reversed. A recession will come. That’s an economic forecast we can make with absolute certainty. We just don’t know when it will arrive. Traditional signs and indicators have been stretched like a rubber band, causing wrong forecasts to abound.
But we haven’t completely repealed economic cycles. And when recessions arrive, they are typically a surprise — catching most people unaware. The burden of consumer debt becomes unbearable when you’ve lost your income, and bankruptcies soar.By now you may be thinking we need a different measure of recession — something based on the level of financial pain that most Americans actually are enduring.