We had one close call in the mid 90s, about 1995-1996. I don't think it actually inverted but it was within less than one percentage point away from inverting. Luckily, 1995-1996 was the start of the Dotcom bubble, which gave us a few more years before the recession of 2001 hit.
We could stave off the coming recession if we had another Dotcom-type bubble, but market corrections are inevitable so it would just be a delay.
> We could stave off the coming recession if we had another Dotcom-type bubble, but market corrections are inevitable so it would just be a delay.
Recessions aren't some magical part of economies that are required to happen every so often. As freddie_mercury pointed out yesterday [0], Australia, has gone 27 years without a recession, Japan had no recession from 1961-1993 (32 years), and the Netherlands had no recession from 1981-2008 (27 years).
If there are bubbles, there will be corrections. And the more "bubbly" the economy, the more often there will be corrections. It's hard to quote other, wildly different economies as examples of why market corrections are not inevitable, but Australia, Japan, and Netherlands are not the same economies as the US.
>Recessions aren't some magical part of economies that are required to happen every so often
Correct, but they do seem to be some magical part of America's economy that is required to happen as often as bubbles happen. They're not regular and you can't set your watch to them, but as sure as there is expansion, there will be contraction. And the bigger the expansion, the bigger the contraction.
We could stave off the coming recession if we had another Dotcom-type bubble, but market corrections are inevitable so it would just be a delay.