[Mathnerd314]

The Fed is pumping money, the yield curve inverted, job openings are flat/declining, people have been predicting recession for 2 years... the precise date of an actual recession is not declared until long after the fact, but I certainly wouldn't bet on the recession not having started already. And there are strong political reasons to avoid any mention of recession, so we might see economic indicators getting distorted in the coming months.

[codyb]

Alternatively

The fed is ensuring liquidity in the overnight markets via short term loans which are paid back the next day (no one seems to know why there’s less liquidity there, could be higher asset values require greater liquid reserves, or some form of capital outflow tightening usd liquidity due to the strength of the dollar, or something else?)

Unemployment is exceeding low, which means more jobs are filled, which means there are less job postings.

People have been predicting doom since the dawn of mankind and sometimes they’re right.

Not sure about the yield curve enough to offer any explanation or even what it means when you say it’s inverted.

Not sure who’s right or what signs are meaningful. Dimension reduction of a search space is a difficult problem. Lots of times people see what they want to see.

I can’t help but just throw my hands up these days and go back to ViM, if it was Vegas I’d split my money fifty fifty on doom and gloom and outstanding success.

[Mathnerd314]

Job openings were a leading indicator in the last recession, see "Planned Next Three Months and Current Job Openings" in https://www.nfib.com/assets/SBET-December-2019.pdf (I ignore planned as it seems noisier). There has been no substantial decline since 2010. The decline in recent months is bigger than in 2017 but could still be noise.

The yield curve is relatively standard economic news: https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2020/12/31/th...

Unemployment is used to define the recession so once that starts increasing again the process is already well underway.

I agree though, predicting a recession is like reading tea leaves. The data is so fuzzy and updated so infrequently that it's useless for practical decisions.

[arkadiyt]

> no one seems to know why there’s less liquidity there

It's because JPMorgan Chase and friends think there is too much risk of intraday bankruptcy right now and no one wants to be left hanging on their loan.

[o-__-o]

here's an interesting thought experiment.. what happens to your loan when your bank goes bankrupt ?

[rswail]

Your loan is an asset of the bank. The administrators or liquidators of the bank can sell that asset to someone else.

Or the entire bank can be purchased/merged in which case your loan becomes an asset on the purchaser's balance sheet.

Bankruptcy doesn't mean "all bets are off".

[wyxuan]

Sure the fed is doing repo market operations (the overnight lending you talk about), but the vast majority of that money is going to bond buying. 300 billion (or some gigantic number like that) has been infused in the econ. This is much of the reason stock market does well. Since money doesn't go to consumer price inflation, it goes to a different kind of inflation, inflation of real assets, like stocks.

People do know why there is less liquidity there. Something like the repo crisis doesn't happen out of the blue.

[NeverFade]

> the yield curve inverted

The yield curve is no longer inverted.

[Mathnerd314]

Right. For example, after the yield curve inverted in 1998, it normalized and inverted 4 more times before the 2001 recession started. It doesn't say much besides "something weird is happening with the economy".