To be fair, nearly every day information surfaces that indicate that a recession is imminent/already here. Trade war fallout, Fed wavering on raising rates, yield curve inversion, poor performance 2019H1 for so many key companies.
The economy is always a reliable source of news. And the mixed signals between employment, wages, and corporate performance makes it interesting.
Semiconductor industry is a very reliable canary for the long term economic situation.
Semi industry employs top economists. It is critically important for them to have extremely thorough economics research when they decide on their financials. Fabs cost billions, and whole fab complexes close to $10B. They take many years to construct and make running.
Financing plans for them have to be done impeccably, and account for way more than capital forecasts.
The financial outlook for a fab changes dramatically depending on how the world changes during its construction. The few fragments of such report done for TSMC I saw included everything down to political, cultural, and technological black swan events.
One of the most bizarre one that they actually managed to predict was the current regulatory and sociocultural "dotcom backlash".
For example, they see big server chip buyers like Facebook, Amazon, Google greatly scaling down their ambitions, and therefore they did not include the option for big reticle sizes in their lithography equipment buy list.
It has been that way for as long as I can determine. There are always bad signs. Sometimes the doom is hours away, sometimes it is years away and in a completely different area. I have no idea how to tell the difference and I don't believe anyone else does either.
There are things you should do to prepare yourself. There are things you can do to prevent doom. They are all things you should be doing anyway even if God told you things would be alright for many more years.
Between 2014 and 2018 or so, the mainstream economic outlook was really good. Unemployment feel below 5%, consumer confidence finally turned positive, economists were complaining about Yellen's continued doveishness towards interest rates when economic indicators showed things were strong, then the tax cuts and associated bonuses and reinvestment.
Brexit happened in mid 2016, the US trade wars start up in late 2017, consumer confidence fell off a cliff last year, etc.
Yeah, there's segments where doom and gloom is perennial. But mainstream reporting tend to report based on fundamentals such as employment, wages, corporate profits, etc.
Look outside the mainstream and you would have seen the people warning about the crash to come then. Nothing came of it as it turns out, but many crashes are not seen in the mainstream press in advance either so that doesn't mean much.