Weren't Recessions Supposed To Be "Once In A Lifetime?"

18th verse, same as the first...

We’ve been debating for about a year now whether or not we’re actually in a recession, and what a recession even is technically, and then some people have introduced terms like “soft landing” and “recessionary conditions but not a recession” and “stagflation” and the like. No one seems to know, and honestly the amount of people who truly understand national-level macroeconomics is probably less than 70. Everyone else is basically just a guy at the club or the bar who has a theory on “the Fed.”

It can seem like we’re in a recession, though. If you’re north of 30, this means you lived through:

• Dot-com bust recession and how that impacted your parents/grandparents

• 2008 recession and aftermath

• COVID recession and ideology parade

And now, about three years after the last one, it looks like you might be living through a new one — at the same time that every business article seems to be about automation coming for jobs. So that’s a nice little wrinkle to this one.

If you go back 40–50 years, you have a multitude of other recessions to deal with. Probably six since 1980, give or take. They seem to be gaining speed recently, though. And that does make some sense in the context of late-stage capitalism, where boom and bust is natural order. Companies see access to free money and go for it. YAY! So they over-hire, over-invest in dumb crap, and then “the markets” and “the Fed” reverse course and investor assh*les clinch up and now some people must be laid off (“business reality”) and some projects must be shelved (“can’t make an omelette without…”) and we’re back to lean times and all that. This video, which admittedly is from a YouTube channel that leans socialist, does a good job of explaining how the cycles work: