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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   32446 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 31, 2025

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60% chance of recession seems far too low given that the priestly caste is fully capable of manipulating the definition of "recession" to punish Trump just as they did to protect Biden.

Trump just stood up and said "Hey everybody, watch this!" and dropped a nuke. There won't be any room for the usual quibbling over what constitutes a recession or whose fault it is. The GOP will be lucky to elect another President before 2040.

Trump just stood up and said "Hey everybody, watch this!" and dropped a nuke.

Wait, are you being literal or metaphorical here? If literal, could I please have some further reading?

It's a pretty clear metaphor.

'Dropped a bomb' is an idiom that means delivering bad news. 'Dropped a nuke' is the former but much more impactful.

I figured I'd better ask because, well, it's not like Trump can't order a nuclear test, and it probably wouldn't even be the most shocking thing he's done this year (though ordering a nuke used in anger would). Hell, I'm not even sure it'd be a bad idea, if only to check that they still work.

I tend to agree unfortunately. The GOP's single largest electoral asset before all of this was being seen as better stewards of the economy. A large number of people voted for them purely based on that. If that image is utterly destroyed, we might see an electoral swing on a scale we haven't in recent memory.

Polling hasn't moved that way yet. But this also hasn't hit the working class yet. This is going to get messy.

We shall see.

just as they did to protect Biden

This is simply not true. Under Biden the US only had one quarter of negative real GDP growth, which is not famously less than two quarters, which not only is conventional definition but pre-Covid there is no recession typically considered so which was less than six months. The 'Covid recession' was obviously a special case because of the scale of the decline in a single quarter - 19% decline versus around 0.25% for the single quarter of 2022 contraction. If you consider 2022 a recession then you also have to include patently non-recessionary years a recessions including 2014 and 1956.

So we're just throwing the spring and summer of 2022 down the memory-hole are we?

What is this article supposed to prove exactly?

What is it supposed to prove? It is supposed to prove that the economy under biden was not all sunshine and cute woodland creatures. That the official definition of recession used by NBER, the FED, Et Al. was revised from "more than three consecutive months of negative growth" to "more than one full calandar quarter" the same week Biden would've crossed the old three month threshold.

That is that, the definition was revised such that declining growth for the last 2 months in Q2 plus the next 2 months of Q3 would not count because even if together they constitute 4 consecutive months of negative growth (a quarter being 3 months long), niether of the 2 two month blocks together would constitute "more than a full calendar quarter".

It is supposed to prove that the economy under biden was not all sunshine and cute woodland creatures

I didn't say it was. The economy does not have only two states of 'good' and 'recession'. Nobody considers any of the years of 1975-1980 as recessionary even though everyone agrees the economy was in the shitter.

That the official definition of recession used by NBER, the FED, Et Al. was revised from "more than three consecutive months of negative growth" to "more than one full calandar quarter" the same week Biden would've crossed the old three month threshold.

This is false (and if not do please provide a source), but it couldn't even possibly be true because there is no 'official' definition of recession in the US, recessions are determined by the NBER business cycle dating committee who don't follow any strict set of rules. Even here, there was never ever any kind of rule of thumb of three months of consecutive negative growth - the only widely accepted definition (to the extent that people accepted that there was one at all) was two consecutive quarters of negative growth, though there are good reasons for the NBER not to strictly stick to this (the 2001 recession saw three non-consecutive quarters of growth, but nobody doubts that as a genuine recession). So the question then is, should the dating committee have declared a recession based on past behaviour? Well, no. If 2022 were a recession it would be the first one in American history to consist of a single quarter of negative growth, and not even a particularly severe quarter of contraction either at -0.25%. It would have been completely at odds with past practice to declare 2022 a recession - there were single quarters of greater or roughly equal contraction not declared a recession in 1947, 1956 and again in 1957, since when there hasn't been an isolated quarter of contraction, until 2022.

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